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Dorothy Leigh Sayers was an English crime novelist, playwright, translator and critic.
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culture · English novelist, translator and Christian writer (1893–1957) · writer · translator · novelist · playwright · essayist · poet · copywriter · editor · short story writer · philologist · also Dorothy L. Sayers, Dorothy Leigh Fleming, Dorothy Sayers, Dorothy Leigh Sayers Fleming, Dorothy Leigh Sayers, Dorothy L Sayers
Born 13 June 1893 · Died 17 December 1957 · Q106740
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“The plot is extremely intricate and full of red herrings, and the solution is kept a dark secret up to the last moment. The weakness ... is that the people never really come alive.”
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“Playwrights are Not Evangelists”
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Crime Reads: The Other Woman’s Name: The Triangular Love Saga of Dorothy L. Sayers, John Cournos and Helen Kestner
Moviefone: A Dorothy L. Sayers Mystery (1987)
Knoxville News Sentinel: Author Dorothy L. Sayers' faith played a role in everything she did | Terry Mattingly
The Guardian: Crossword book club: Have His Carcase by Dorothy L Sayers
The Guardian: Love All review – Dorothy L Sayers’s battle-of-the-sexes comedy lacks bite
The Guardian: 'No Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition or Mumbo Jumbo': Dorothy L Sayers and the Detection Club
Colin Duriez published a further biography of Sayers, interspersing the factual material with imagined dramatised scenes and conversations
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The Guardian: Mutual Admiration Society by Mo Moulton review – the pioneering club of Dorothy L Sayers
The Guardian: Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers – a weighty novel that still thrills
English Heritage installed a blue plaque at 24 Great James Street, Bloomsbury, where Sayers lived between 1921 and 1929
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At the invitation of Sayers's estate, Jill Paton Walsh published a completion of an unfinished Wimsey novel, Thrones, Dominations, which Sayers began in 1936 but abandoned after six chapters
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Marking the centenary of the subject's birth
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Reynolds noted that because of Sayers's translations, Dante has been read by "more English-speaking readers in the last forty years than he had in the preceding six and a quarter centuries"
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With a preface by Fleming and a foreword by P
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And, as at 2024, continues in its mission "to promote the study of the life, works and thoughts of this great scholar and writer, to encourage the performance of her plays and the publication of books by and about her, t
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The minor planet 3627 Sayers was named after her
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In an article in The Listener, the cultural critic Martin Green described Sayers as "one of the world's masters of the pornography of class-distinction", while he outlined Wimsey's treatment of his social inferiors
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Died 1957-12-17.
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“What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.”
But when Sayers died her version of the final Cantica, Heaven, was only two-thirds complete
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Penguin Books published Purgatory, the second volume of her translation of The Divine Comedy
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With No Flowers By Request, another collaborative serial, published in The Daily Sketch, co-written with E
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“One of the reasons I no longer write detective stories is the income tax. Anything that is liable to sell well may be ruinous.”
Sayers was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of Durham
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Career landmark: chairperson (1949–1957).
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Penguin Books published The Divine Comedy, Cantica I, Hell in Sayers's translation
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The Canterbury Festival staged another of her plays, The Devil to Pay
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The last of her full-length books featuring Wimsey
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Went on tour nationally, played a limited West End season, and was well reviewed
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Sayers published what she intended to be the last Wimsey novel, Gaudy Night, set in Harriet Vane's old Oxford college
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Sayers collaborated with Detection Club colleagues on a longer serial for the BBC, The Scoop, and on a book, The Floating Admiral
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Sayers became a founder member of the Detection Club
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In Strong Poison, she introduced a leading female character, Harriet Vane, the object of Wimsey's affection
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Her last year as an employee of Benson's, Sayers and her husband moved from London to the small Essex town of Witham, which remained their home for the rest of their lives
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And The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club in 1928
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To mixed reviews; one critic thought it a "somewhat complicated mystery
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Sayers took a job as a copywriter at S
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Sayers returned to London, accepted a teaching position with a girls' school in Acton, London, and began a relationship with a fellow writer, John Cournos
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Sayers was among the first to have her degree officially awarded
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By a school near Verneuil-sur-Avre in Normandy as assistant to Eric Whelpton, who was teaching English there
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Secured a post with the publisher and bookseller Basil Blackwell in Oxford
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Was awarded first class honours in what was termed modern (in fact medieval) French in her final examinations
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Studied at Somerville College (1912).
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Sayers nearly died, and as a result went temporarily bald and took to wearing wigs
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Born 1893-06-13.
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