In the early 1920s she worked for the publisher Victor Gollancz. In 1920 Sayers contributed two poems, one of them a love poem named Veronica to the first and only issue of The Quorum, the UK's first homosexual magazine. She also published a number of poems in the Oxford Magazine. Later, Sayers worked for Blackwell's and then as a teacher in several locations, including Normandy, France. Her second book of poems, 'Catholic Tales and Christian Songs', was published in 1918, also by Blackwell. Sayers's first book of poetry was published in 1916 as OP. Her experience of Oxford academic life eventually inspired her penultimate Peter Wimsey novel, Gaudy Night.Ĭareer Poetry, teaching, and advertisements Women were not awarded degrees at that time, but Sayers was among the first to receive a degree when the position changed a few years later in 1920 she graduated as an MA. She graduated with first-class honours in 1915. In 1912, Sayers received the Gilchrist Scholarship for Modern Languages to Somerville College, Oxford where she studied modern languages and medieval literature and was taught by Mildred Pope. Her father later moved to the living of Christchurch, in Cambridgeshire. įrom 1909 Sayers was educated at the Godolphin School, a boarding school in Salisbury. The nearby River Great Ouse and the Fens invite comparison with the book's vivid description of a massive flood around the village.

She was inspired by her father's restoration of the Bluntisham church bells in 1910. The church graveyard next to the elegant Regency-style rectory features the surnames of several characters from her mystery The Nine Tailors.

She grew up in the tiny village of Bluntisham in Huntingdonshire after her father was given the living there as rector of Bluntisham- cum- Earith. When Sayers was six, her father started teaching her Latin. Her father, originally from Littlehampton, West Sussex, was a chaplain of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, and headmaster of Christ Church Cathedral School. Her mother was a daughter of Frederick Leigh, a solicitor whose family roots were in the landed gentry in the Isle of Wight, and had been born at 'The Chestnuts', Millbrook, Hampshire.

She was the daughter of Helen Mary Leigh and her husband, the Rev. Sayers, an only child, was born on 13 June 1893 at the Headmaster's House on Brewer Street in Oxford.

Somerville College, Oxford, where Sayers studied and gained the inspiration for her novel Gaudy Night

Dorothy sayers gaudy night