Dorothy L. Sayers
1893–1957 · Novelist, translator, dramatist
Born in the Old Choir House on Brewer Street, Oxford. Read modern French at Somerville (first, 1915). Created Lord Peter Wimsey and set Gaudy Night in her old college.
Dorothy Leigh Sayers was born in 1893 at the Old Choir House in Brewer Street, Oxford — her father was headmaster of Christ Church Cathedral School. She came up to Somerville College and was awarded first-class honours in 1915 in what was then called modern French (in fact medieval French).
Eleven of her twelve novels and four of her short-story collections feature Lord Peter Wimsey, the aristocratic amateur detective who became one of the great figures of Golden Age detective fiction. Gaudy Night (1935) — set in Harriet Vane's old Oxford college, recognisably Somerville — is the most Oxford of her novels and the one most often used as a literary key to women's college life between the wars. Sayers died at her home in Witham in 1957; her ashes are interred at the base of the tower of St Anne's Church in Soho, where she had been a churchwarden.
Sources: Wikipedia: Dorothy L. Sayers
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