ART LIFE

POSTCARD BIOGRAPHIES FROM THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY: 2; P D James on Dorothy L Sayers (1893-1957)

After the success of the first series of postcard biographies, which were written in the 1920s and 1930s and taken from the NPG's archives, here is the second in our new series of specially commissioned 70-word biographies of and by major figures of today

Dorothy L Sayers, Oxford educated, only child of a clergyman, was a religious dramatist, pugnacious polemicist and translator of Dante, but her fame rests on the popularity of eleven detective novels featuring her aristocratic sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey. An innovator of manner not matter, her vigorous prose, intelligence, lively characterisation, humour and effective use of setting early established her as among the most influential, if controversial, writers of detective fiction.