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Barbara Reynolds. Dorothy Sayers: Her Life and Soul. New York. St. Martin's. 1993. ix + 398 pages, ill. + 28 plates. $24.95.
"A novelist is a tradesman who supplies books to the public. Writing books is not a hobby; it is a job, a trade like any other." Dorothy L. Sayers is remembered because she tells a good and enduring mystery story. She lived and wrote during the great era of British detective fiction, and her novels featuring Lord Peter Wimsey have been in publication continuously. But she was more than a mystery writer: she was also a Christian apologist who spent the last fourteen years of her life caught up with Dante, whom she translated.
Sayers was born one hundred years ago in Oxford, the only child of the headmaster of the Christ Church Choir School. At age six, her father decided that she was old enough to learn Latin, and she was conjugating Latin verbs six months later. She was one of the first women to receive a degree from Oxford. After a comfortable Edwardian childhood and her years at Oxford, she worked in London as an advertising copywriter and began her Wimsey novels. She survived unhappy relationships, failed affairs, and the birth of her illegitimate son. Her marriage was not the happiest.
Lord Peter, Sayers wrote, was "the true successor of Roland and Lancelot." He had started life as the Duke of Peterborough in an unpublished short story sketched out...