Dorothy Sayers, the daughter of an Anglican cleric, was one of the first women to receive a degree from Oxford University. Graduating in 1915, she joined Blackwells, the publishers, as a copywriter. Her first novel, Whose Body?, published in 1923, created the now celebrated figure of Lord Peter Wimsey, who was to appear in another 14 volumes of short and full-length stories. She became the doyen of crime writers, though she had an unfailing admiration for E. C. Bentley and G. K. Chesterton.