MUTUAL ADMIRATION SOCIETY

HOW DOROTHY L SAYERS AND HER OXFORD CIRCLE REMADE THE WORLD FOR WOMEN

MO MOULTON

Corsair, 384pp, £20

In 1912 the future crime writer Dorothy L Sayers and a group of her friends at Somerville founded a literary club which they called the Mutual Admiration Society. There were a dozen members but Mo Moulton concentrates on four of them, who remained in close touch through lives which witnessed a feminist revolution in terms of laws changing and horizons opening up. Moulton argues that her quartet – two writers, a teacher and a midwife – each contributed to this revolution. Frances Wilson in the Sunday Times wondered how ‘Sayers’s sleuthing hero, Lord Peter Wimsey, improved the lives of women apart from that of his sidekick and eventual bride

Harriet Vane.’ She also noted that loyalty between the four women ‘did not involve intimacy, and it is unclear how much any of them knew about the courage, conflicts or sacrifices involved in one another’s various domestic arrangements’.

Laura Freeman in the Times complained about the book’s

Loyalty between the four women ‘did not involve intimacy’

‘academese. Take this: “On one level, their story reveals the generative power of friendships, which create an intimate local space in which we can become something or someone quite different from our assigned social or familial categories.” (Urgh.)’ But she praised as ‘sensitive and enlightening’ Moulton’s discussions of the obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, and of Sayers’s changing attitude to ‘inversion’. Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian admired Moulton’s refusal ‘to heroise these women, heroic as they undoubtedly were at times. But they were also complicated and singular, brimming with the ordinary prejudices of their time.’ But she regretted the author’s ‘sturdily dutiful style’.