Known to millions as the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey and the bestselling author of a dozen detective novels, Dorothy Leigh Sayers was in reality a complex woman––moved, she said, by “a careless rage for life.” It is this complex Sayers, brilliant student, controversial apologist, witty, bawdy, intolerant of fools––the woman “terrified of emotion”––who is revealed in this new biography.

The production of Sayers’ radio play on the life of Christ, The Man Born to Be King, raised a storm of controversy. Reveling in the verbal battle, pugnacious, tenacious, she nonetheless pursued the Christian faith not merely as an intellectual godgame, but as the dominant force in her life. The Wimsey novels’ treatment of the themes of justice, guilt, punishment and the imperatives of personal responsibility reflect her beliefs.