Dorothy Sayers was the daughter of an Anglican clergyman and headmaster. She became best known as a writer of detective novels (many featuring Lord Peter Wimsey), but she also wrote many other novels, plays, and collections of essays. After teaching herself old Italian she prepared a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy that remains one of the most popular and accessible editions in print.  

A devout Anglican, Sayers served as churchwarden of her London parish, and took to writing essays and delivering lectures on Christian doctrine. In The Mind of the Maker, she drew an analogy between the Trinity and any act of human creation that involves the Idea, the Energy (the power of creative production), and the Power (the effect of the work on its audience). “The only Christian work,” she wrote, “is good work, well done.” So influential were her apologetic works that the archbishop of Canterbury offered her a Lambeth doctorate in theology (which she declined).  

Sayers died on December 17, 1957.  

“Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this. . . . A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them . . . who never made arch jokes about them; . . . who praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously. . . . There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything ‘funny’ about woman’s nature .”  

—Dorothy Sayers