From Publishers Weekly
Sayers, The Passionate Intellect of Reynolds's earlier book, is revealed as a more exciting person in this biography, published in observance of the centenary of the writer's birth. As the author of sophisticated mysteries featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, aristocratic detective, and feminist Harriet Vane, Sayers gained fame during the l920s; she was also among the first women to earn a degree from Oxford, and when she died in l957 at the age of 64 she was involved in translating Dante's Divine Comedy . She was religious as well as scholarly and expressed her Christian beliefs in stage and radio dramas. Sayers had a sense of humor and countless interests, from music to motorcycling. But she also suffered from failed love affairs and from secretly bearing a son out of wedlock in the intolerant moral climate of her day. Excerpts from her correspondence and publications illuminate Reynolds's discerning depiction of this intriguing woman. Photos. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Another ``interim report'' on the life (1893-1957) of the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey and reluctant Christian apologist, by a longtime friend, completer of Sayers's translation of Dante and author of The Passionate Intellect: Dorothy L. Sayers' Encounter with Dante (1989- -not reviewed). The problem all Sayers's biographers face is to reconcile her early career as a pioneer and leading theorist of the formal detective story with the religious plays, essays, and lectures to which she committed her last 15 years. In the absence of a collected edition of Sayers's letters, Reynolds still tries to make Sayers speak for herself whenever possible by quoting letters, conversations, and passages from her voluminous writings. The result is a view of the writer that Sayers herself would likely have approved of: as a generous, fiercely intelligent woman whose cardinal passion, her intellectual ardor, led her from Oxford to the hand-to-mouth London bohemianism that spawned the inimitably foppish Wimsey and then, quite logically, to a defense of the writer's imagination (The Mind of the Maker) that set forth Sayers's understanding of the Trinity. Despite some stiffness in the early chapters, and a disinclination to criticize her subject even mildly, Reynolds captures the ardent nature that sustained Sayers through her unrequited love affairs, her pregnancy without marriage, her lifelong support of the son she never publicly acknowledged, and the writing she felt certain from the beginning was her vocation. It isn't until the popular Wimsey books are behind, though, that Reynolds's matching passion comes out--she calls The Mind of the Maker and The Man Born to Be King Sayers's ``two greatest works''--and the biography comes into its own, even though only a few years of Sayers's life remain before Reynolds encounters the preemptive shadow of her own earlier book. Best, then, on the later years--the years of her own friendship with Sayers--that Reynolds has already described so sympathetically. Fans of Lord Peter may feel let down. (Thirty b&w photographs) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Book News, Inc.
Remembered above all as the detective writer who created Lord Peter Wimsey, Sayers was also a scholar and one of the first women to be awarded a degree from Oxford University. Reynolds, who completed the translation of Dante's Divine Comedy that Sayers left unfinished when she died and who is chairman of the Dorothy L. Sayers Society, profiles the famous writer on the 100th anniversary of her birth. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

ANNOTATION

Mystery writer Dorothy Sayers is loved and remembered, most notably, for the creation of sleuths Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. As this biography attests, Sayers was also one of the first women to be awarded a degree from Oxford, a playwright, and an essayist--but also a woman with personal joys and tragedies. Here, Reynolds, a close friend of Sayers, presents a convincing and balanced portrait of one of the 20th century's most brilliant, creative women. 30 b&w photos. 416 pp.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

No definitive biography of Dorothy L. Sayers can be written until her letters are published. The present work is based on a selection of the most personal and significant, from which ample quotations are provided. The result is that she largely tells her own story, and in her own voice. In theory, she would have approved, for she stated, in her unfinished work on Wilkie Collins, that the secret of success in biography was to allow the subject to speak for himself as far as possible in diaries and letters. In fact, as far as she was concerned, she abhorred the personal approach. She expressed the hope that no account of her life would be written until fifty years after her death. She told her son that she intended to destroy all letters and private papers in her possession. But she did not do so; and she must have realised that the recipients of her own remarkable letters were unlikely to throw them away. Some use of them has already been made by previous biographers but the portraits of her that have emerged so far have left me dissatisfied. I had the good fortune to know Dorothy Sayers. Over a period of eleven years we met and corresponded (mainly about Dante) and we became close friends. The person I knew is recognisable in her letters and I have retraced her there. Despite her vehement protestations to the contrary, all her writings ? novels, plays, poems, theological articles, translations and literary criticism ? are deeply and consistently personal. I have no doubt that the more we get to know and understand her, the more we will appreciate and comprehend her works. That is my justification, if any is needed, for presenting this new ? though still interim ? biography of Dorothy L. Sayers in the centenary year of her birth.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Sayers, The Passionate Intellect of Reynolds's earlier book, is revealed as a more exciting person in this biography, published in observance of the centenary of the writer's birth. As the author of sophisticated mysteries featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, aristocratic detective, and feminist Harriet Vane, Sayers gained fame during the l920s; she was also among the first women to earn a degree from Oxford, and when she died in l957 at the age of 64 she was involved in translating Dante's Divine Comedy . She was religious as well as scholarly and expressed her Christian beliefs in stage and radio dramas. Sayers had a sense of humor and countless interests, from music to motorcycling. But she also suffered from failed love affairs and from secretly bearing a son out of wedlock in the intolerant moral climate of her day. Excerpts from her correspondence and publications illuminate Reynolds's discerning depiction of this intriguing woman. Photos. ( Oct. )

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