Lady of mystery

These words, penned by Dorothy Leigh Sayers in her undated and unpublished memoir, My Edwardian Childhood, indicate the affection she felt for a city that nurtured her both intellectually and emotionally.

Sayers spent only a fraction of her life in Oxford, but her years here were some of her most formative, and she later drew on her experiences when creating her famous amateur sleuth, the eccentric Lord Peter Wimsey.

She was born at 1 Brewer Street, just off St Aldates, on June 13, 1893, and christened at Christ Church Cathedral, where her father, Reverend Henry Sayers, was chaplain. He was also Headmaster of Christ Church Cathedral School, and their former home is now the school's Reception. A blue plaque on the wall nearby marks the Sayers' connection.

When Dorothy was four years-old, her father was offered an incumbency at Bluntisham in Huntingdonshire, in the heart of the Fens, and this was to be the Sayers family home for the next 20 years.

Dorothy became a boarder at Godolphin School in Salisbury, where she emerged as an exceptionally bright pupil, excelling at languages and music and gaining three distinctions in her School Certificate. It was little surprise to anyone that she was awarded a Gilchrist Scholarship to study at Oxford.

Frustratingly, Dorothy's return to Oxford was delayed by a serious bout of measles, which also resulted in a temporary loss of her hair. She was to suffer from recurring alopecia for the rest of her life.

Sayers finally arrived in Oxford in the autumn of 1912, to study Modern Languages at Somerville College. Somerville had been built just over 30 years earlier, in 1879, the first of Oxford's women-only colleges. By the end of the century, Lady Margaret Hall, St Hugh's and St Hilda's had followed in quick succession, but Somerville was the pioneer, and Sayers was one of the students who helped establish its reputation as a college for strong, independent women.

Although Somerville provided Sayers with many happy memories, she chafed under the restrictions imposed upon the students. In his informative and entertaining biography of Sayers, David Coombs captures the essence of Oxford University in 1912: "Daily prayer was compulsory. Everyone was addressed as Miss. No student could attend dances in the city during term, or even go to a tennis party on foot because it was thought unladylike to carry a racquet through the streets. Male visitors to the girls' quarters were restricted to their relations and spiritual advisers. Whenever the sexes met elsewhere, a chaperon had to be present."

Small wonder that Sayers, with her naturally fun-loving, flamboyant personality, pushed the boundaries. Coombs tells us that she took pleasure in "unashamedly talking in the Bodleian, cutting lectures, none too surreptitiously smoking cigars, wearing a badly fitting wig, and proclaiming to all who would listen (and those who wouldn't) that she was an agnostic and proud of it".

Unsurprisingly, she was a popular student, who spent a disproportionate amount of her time socialising, becoming part of an exclusive clique known as the Mutual Admiration Society, and singing with the Oxford Bach Choir. She later recalled being "reproved by Don for singing Bach in the bathroom".

When Somerville was commandeered for use as a military hospital in 1914, its students were transferred to Oriel. The college's Skimmery Quad became the setting for a Going Down Play in 1916 entitled Pied Pipings or The Innocents Abroad, for which Dorothy penned three songs.

She found time for her studies, too, and was one of the most outstanding students of her year, gaining first-class honours in Modern Languages, although she had to wait a few more years before Oxford started conferring degrees on female scholars.

Shortly after graduating, she worked briefly for Blackwell's, who published her first book, a volume of poetry, in 1916. During this time she lived first at 17 Longwall Street and later at Bath Place. She left Oxford in 1920 to work in London. Fifteen years later, Somerville featured as the fictitious Shrewsbury College in Sayers' final Wimsey novel, Gaudy Night, in which she describes Oxford nostalgically as "City of life, city of my dreams".

Sayers' feminist outlook is very much to the fore in this novel, in which Wimsey meets his intellectual match in Harriet Vane, whom he eventually marries.

It seems to be through the requited love of Wimsey and Vane that Sayers' own longings are brought sharply into focus. During the early 1920s, Sayers had two disastrous love affairs, one of which resulted in the birth of a son, whom she had fostered and whose existence she never publicly acknowledged. Shortly afterwards, she married Oswald Arthur Fleming, a Scottish journalist and First World War veteran, and they apparently enjoyed a happy enough union, although Fleming reportedly felt eclipsed by his wife's literary successes.

Vane is undoubtedly modelled on Sayers herself, but while Wimsey takes some characteristics from her husband, he is a much more perfect being - so much so, in fact, that critics have derided the character for being too good to be true.

In another nod towards the city of her alma mater, Sayers has Wimsey down as a Balliol graduate, who achieved "1st Class Honours, school of Modern History, 1912".

Over a career spanning four decades, Sayers not only produced a string of detective novels and short stories, she was also a respected poet, playwright, essayist, theologian and Dante scholar. She died suddenly of heart failure on December 17, 1957, at Witham in Essex, where she had lived since her marriage.

By then it was 41 years since she had left behind her halcyon days at Oxford, but there is little doubt that the city played a major part in nurturing her extraordinary intellect and literary talent.