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Harriet has continued to serve as a recognizable, living example of the modern, creative, independent woman, battling to reconcile the conflicting claims of the personal and the impersonal. Still today I hear many women, even young women, responding to Gaudy Night along these lines: "How is it that Sayers knows exactly what I feel?"

How did Sayers move from writing popular mystery stories to creating religious plays?

In 1936, Dorothy Sayers was invited to write a play for Canterbury Cathedral, where a series of dramas was being produced. One of these was the celebrated drama by T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral. At that point, Sayers was known primarily for her mystery stories. She had written only a few poems related to the Christian faith, but Charles Williams, a member with C. S. Lewis of the famous Inklings group, had read and admired one of these early works—a brief poetic drama entitled "The Mocking of Christ"—and recommended her for the task.

Sayers consented, and the result was The Zeal of Thy House [published in 1937]—a story featuring the architect William of Sens, who had rebuilt part of Canterbury Cathedral after it was destroyed by fire in 1174. Sayers's lifelong motif of human creativity—its nature and its limits—first comes to the fore here.

And from Zeal's success came invitations to write other plays. One of these was the BBC radio nativity play He That Should Come, broadcast on Christmas Day, 1938. A follow-up of 12 plays on the whole life of Christ, The Man Born to be King, found even greater success, captivating audiences with its lively characterizations and realistic dialogue. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. William Temple, called these plays "one of the most powerful instruments in evangelism which the Church had had put into its hands for a long time past." C. S. Lewis admired them very much and used to read them every Lent. And even today they continue to be produced.

Two more plays followed, both well worth reading today: Just Vengeance, which is in some ways her most difficult and rewarding play, and The Emperor Constantine, which is still producible in shortened form.

When she began writing her plays, Sayers was not yet doing any of the lay theological writing for which she later became renowned. How did this happen?

In April 1938, following the success of her radio play He That Should Come, the editor of the Sunday Times invited Sayers to contribute an article for Passion Sunday. She wrote "The Greatest Drama Ever Staged is the Official Creed of Christendom." This and a companion article, "The Dogma Is the Drama," also published in April 1938 in St Martin's Review, launched her into yet another career as a public apologist and theological writer.

A sentence from a letter Sayers wrote at the time gives you a flavor of these essays: "The dogma of the Incarnation is the most dramatic thing about Christianity, and indeed, the most dramatic thing that ever entered the mind of man; but if you tell people so, they stare at you in bewilderment."

How did her role as a public Christian writer expand in wartime?

As soon as the Second World War was declared, her publisher Victor Gollancz invited his most marketable author to write what he called "a wartime essay." She responded with a book of 152 pages titled Begin Here. This book and a related series of books on national reconstruction that Sayers conceived and edited—Bridgeheads, she called it—laid out four themes.

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December (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49