June 13, 1893

Dorothy Sayers (June 13, 1893 to December 17, 1957) was the author of a number of essays defending her Anglican faith. She was one of the first women to graduate from Oxford, (Somerville College) in 1915 with a first class honors degree in modern languages, and her translation of Dante is still well-regarded. And she has other claims to fame.

From 1922 to 1931 she was a copywriter at the London advertising agency, Bensons. While she apparently enjoyed the work and was good at it, in later essays she robustly condemned the business of creating need where none existed.....

Her first novel, Whose Body (1923), introduced the world to the aristocratic crime fighter Lord Peter Wimsey, who featured in 14 subsequent novels and short stories. Athletic, scholarly, stylish and sharp, Lord Peter developed over the course of the books into a fully rounded and psychologically complex character, utterly adored by his public. By the late 1930s Sayers vowed there would be no more Wimsey novels, but on her death an unfinished book, ,Thrones, Dominations was found, and completed by the author Jill Paton Walsh

When Sayers introduced Harriet Vane, a detective story writer, into the Wimsey narrative  in Strong Poison (1930) , the character was  a controversial addition to the Wimsey story line. 

If you don't have a copy of the excellent biography of Sayers, Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul (1993) by Barbara Reynolds, you might read the Guardian writeup of her importance, which is where I took the quotes above.

Here is a statue memorializing her cat





and here is the rest of the artwork:




This statue was put up in 1994, and is the work of the English sculptor John Doubleday (born 1947). It is located across from what had been her home in Witham, which is in Essex.