Dorothy Leigh Sayers

1893-1957. English writer. Born in Oxford, she graduated at the university there and then embarked on a teaching career. In 1923 she published her first of a long series of detective novels which were to make her probably the most popular mystery writer in England. During World War II she lived in Essex and was a member of the group that included C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Owen Barfield. By nature and by preference she was a scholar and an expert on the Middle Ages. Her translation of the Divine Comedy is one of the finest, with unexcelled notes illuminating the Christian meanings of the poem. The Man Born to Be King (1941) is a series of radio plays on the life of Christ which displays her fine insights and her substantial endowments as a dramatist. In The Mind of the Maker she is at her best as a lay apologist for Christian doctrine, especially the doctrine of the Trinity.