Sayers: Wishing Her Way to Success

Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957), creator of dapper detective Lord Peter Wimsey, is known for her complicated plots and aristocratic characters. What some may not know is that she developed her upper-class scenarios and players partly out of envy. During the 1920s, when she began writing the Wimsey adventures, she was living on a meager salary as an advertising agency copywriter in London. Eventually, her fiction became so popular and lucrative she was able to leave mundane work behind, settle in a country estate and live in the high style she formerly could only write about.

Incidentally, Sayers was one of the first women to earn a degree from Oxford (1915), receiving honors as a student of medieval literature.