While religious drama, particularly religious drama by female playwrghts, proliferated in the early twentieth century, Dorothy Leigh Sayers is perhaps the key figure for women in the genre. Famous for her mystery novels, Sayers life is well-documented . An outspoken lay-theologian, and acclaimed playwright, both Sayers' theological philosophies and her substantial body of work are readily accessible for study. A contemporary and acquaintance of C.S. Lewis and T.S Eliot, Dorothy Sayers has been ranked among the masters of modern Christian authors and playwrights. For these reasons, she is chosen to represent the "modern" period (1900-1950) in The Prodigal Daughter Project.

Dorothy Leigh Sayers came into the world with a propensity toward religious discourse . Dorothy was born in 1893 to Helen Mary Sayers and Reverend Henry Sayers, headmaster of the Christchurch Cathedral Choir School, England. At age four, the Sayers moved to the Bluntisham Rectory in the Fens where she was home schooled. Education was a great passion and achievement in Sayers' life at a time when higher education for women was still suspect (Oxford did not award degrees to women until 1920, when Sayers was one in the first group of women to receive a Master of Arts degree at the institution).

Dorothy's formal education began at age 16 at Goldphin School in Salisbury. Sayers later attended Somerville College in Oxford and graduated in 1915 with a first class degree in French. After graduation, she briefly returned to Christchurch where her father had been called to a new parish, She became a schoolmistress (the occupation of default for an educated woman in the early twentieth century). Dorothy taught young women in Hull, England, for one year before returning to Oxford.

In 1917, Sayers left academia for a more commercial career. Taking a position as a publishing apprentice with Blackwell's, Sayers was able to get her first works published. Although she had posed as an agnostic for much of her student career, Sayers' early works revealed her closeted Christianity. In 1918, Sayers published Op. 1 and Catholic Tales and Christian Songs. The latter featured "The Mocking of Christ," Dorothy's first dramatic poem.

In the decade that followed, Sayers took up more secular and domestic themes in her works and lifestyle . She quit Blackwell's to pursue an unrequited lover (Eric Whelpton), following him to France. Eventually, however, Dorothy reprioritized her career by returning, alone, to England and working as a copywriter for S.H. Benson's in 1922. While working at the agency, Sayers published novels regularly. The first included Whose Body? (1923), Clouds of Witness (1926) and The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club(1928). During this period, Sayers focused on detective fiction and did not take up religious themes in her works. The decade of the 1920s was a time of great personal change for the author including the birth of an illegitimate son whom was raised by an aunt, a marriage to Oswald Arthur Fleming (nicknamed Mac), and the death of her parents. Although the twenties were a tumultuous time for Sayers, she managed to build a successful and lucrative career as an author and published four more novels before 1930.

A chain of events that included Dorothy's BBC broadcast premiere of a detective serial "Behind theScreen," led her back to religious themes andplaywriting. In the thirties, Sayers' detective fiction was regularly broadcast in the BBC. Meanwhile,
tensions surrounding WWII prompted Sayers to speak openly about Christian ethics and religious issues. Sayers, however, declined to write for religious broadcasts on grounds that her work could be misconstrued (Kenney 220). Dorothy's resolve softened when her play Busman's Honeymoon caught the attention of Charles Williams, who had written a play for the 1936
Canterbury Festival, which produced works by such such prominent figures as T.S. Eliot (Murder in the Cathedral (1935). Upon the suggestion ofWilliams, Sayers was commissioned to write a play about the Cathedral's architect William of Saens f (Kenney 218). The subsequent play Zeal of Thy House (1937) dealt with issues of creation, vocation and pride. An architect, equating his gift to God's, wrestles with humilty after falling from a scaffold, unable to return to his life's work. Wholly successful, Sayers was again commissioned by the Friends of the Cathedral to write the 1939 Canterbury play The
Devil to Pay.

Seven years after her refusal to write a religious play for broadcast, Sayers wrote the nativity play He That Should Come. In 1940, the BBC's Director of Religious Broadcasting, the Rev. J.W. Welch approached Dorothy with the idea of doing a series on the life of Christ for the "Children's Hour." Dorothy agreed on the condition that she be allowed to personify Christ in modern English. Because England had laws against stage representations of Christ, Sayer's idea was first submitted to the Lord Chamberlain who approved of the project on the grounds that it was radio and not a stage or television play. Despite his approval, Dorothy's teaser essay titled "The Greatest Drama Ever Told," which appeared in the Sunday Times, sparked controversy.

In her book Such a Strange Lady, Janet Hutchman details the reaction to Sayers radio-play: the Daily Mail wrote "Life of Christ in Slang"; the Lord's Observance Day Society bought a full page ad in The Church of England Newspaper asking fellow-readers to 'write in your thousands... to ban this Christ-dishonouring proposal'; the Glasgow Herald announced a petition of 30,000 signatures to put before the King. After a meeting among the Minister of Information, the BBC Director General and the Central Religious Advisory Committee, a vote of 13 out of 14 in favor of the play approved the series for broadcast. (130-138). Publicity surrounding the debate helped to gather an audience of over two million listeners for the broadcast which the Archbishop Temple called "one of the greatest contributions to the religious life of our times."
The debate surrounding her work confounded and inspired Sayers who wrote, "That did it. Apparently the spectacle of a middle-aged female detective-novelist admitting publicly that the juducial murder of God might compete in interest with
the corpse in the coal hole was the sensation for which the Christian world was waiting" (qtd in Kenney
220). Following The Man Born to be King (1941), Sayers wrote the religious plays Just Vengeance (1946) and The
Emperor Constantine (1951)

Sayers was diligent about documenting her theories of a Chistian dramatic aesthetic. Her essays address artists confronted with presenting Christianity to a post-Christian world. These essays and letters included "What Do We Believe?" "Creed or Chaos," and the "Mind of the Maker." Sayers continued to engage in discourse on religion at St. Anne's House, a meeting place for "pagan thinkers" and all people regardless of race, creed or political alliance. Here, she presented lectures such as "Christian Faith and Contemporary Culture" and invited peers such as T.S. Eliot to appear.

As World War II escalated and the theatres closed, Sayers turned her energies to writing war-time pamphlets and, after the war, to translating Dante's Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise for Penguin Books. In 1950 her husband died and Dorothy became more active in the church. She became the vicar's warden at St. Thomas Regent St. and, after the church united with St. Anne's, Soho, and St. Paul's Covent Garden , she was made church warden. Here her love of religious theatre continued as the drama group performed scenes from her play Emperor Constantine (a/k/a Christ's Emperor), Christopher Fry's A Sleep of Prisoners and Ronald Duncan's This Way to the Tomb. She remained active in church, drama, and broadcasting until her sudden death from coronary thrombosis on December 17, 1957.

Dorothy Sayers ashes remain in the tower of St. Anne's as a memorial to this remarkable woman, scholar, novelist, playwright, and lay theologian. Ironically, in a letter penned in 1954, Dorothy Leigh Sayers wrote, "I never, so help me God, wanted to get entangled in religious apologetic, or to bear witness for Christ, or to proclaim my faith to the world, or anything of that kind." Yet modern and contemporary religious drama could not have developed as it did in the twentieth century without her bravery to experiment with the dramatic form, her boldness to portray the humanity of Christ, and her seriousness in developing a modern Christian aesthetic.