Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women

The Mutual Admiration Society was a group of friends with literary aspirations who entered Sommerville College before World War I and were later among the first women to earn full degrees from Oxford. Shaped by the Great War and their upper-middle to upper class backgrounds, they went on to push the expectations laid out for their lives without quite breaking them. Sayers is the best known now, both as the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey and as a scholar and translator, and I suspect Mo Moulton focused on her because of this. For the most influential, however, I'd choose Charis Frankenburg, who became a midwife and wrote books on birth control and childrearing, before becoming one of the first female magistrates in the UK. Other MAS members became academics, playwrights, and secondary school teachers while maintaining ties of varying strengths to their old friends. Moulton's book gives us a glimpse into their lives, but stayed a bit too much on the surface. I'd prefer a deeper look into the individual women but this serves as a good primer on their cohort.