Dorothy L. Sayers: Works and Days

Because Dorothy L. Sayers had such a varied career—first she was a detective novelist, then a dramatist, then an expositor of Christian doctrine, then a translator of Dante, and along the way paused to write influential essays on feminism ("Are Women Human?") and the possibility of using medieval models in modern education ("The Lost Tools of Learning")—she poses a distinctive challenge to the biographer. And this is not even to mention her career as an advertising copywriter, creating campaigns for Colman's mustard and Guinness.

("Guinness Is Good For You.") How can such disparate endeavors be understood in proper relation to one another? Moreover, while she was known as a young woman for her piety, and for decades as one of Britain's most prominent Christian intellectuals, there was a period of nearly two decades—as it happens, the decades during which she helped to invent the classic British novel of detection—when it would have been impossible for her readers to discern that she possessed any religious belief whatsoever. She was outspoken, forthright, blunt—but also a mysterious person who kept some secrets to herself. Alan Jacobs draws on his expertise in mid-20th-century British literary culture and Christian theology to untangle the diverse threads of Sayers's life and tell the compelling, dramatic, and occasionally very funny story of a remarkable woman.