Although Dorothy L. Sayers is known chiefly for her detective fiction and somewhat less well for her translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, she was also a prolific and controversial essayist and lecturer. She is among the more significant modern British Christian apologists; if she is not so well known as G. K. Chesterton or C. S. Lewis, for example, it is partly because her other work has overshadowed her expository prose.

Dorothy Leigh Sayers was born in Oxford on 13 June 1893 to the Reverend Henry Sayers and Helen May Leigh Sayers. After being graduated from Somerville College, Oxford, in 1915, she worked as a teacher of modern languages and as a reader for the Blackwell publishing firm, then, from 1922 until 1929, as a copywriter for a London advertising firm. In 1926 she married Capt. Oswald Atherton Fleming, who was then a successful journalist; within two years his health broke down, and he...