Mutual Admiration Society — Dorothy L Sayers and her rule-breaking friends

In 1912, over cups of hot cocoa and toasted marshmallows at Somerville College, Oxford, a group of first-year undergraduates came together “to read aloud our literary efforts and to receive and deliver criticism”.

Headed by Dorothy L Sayers — who would go on to become the renowned crime writer and creator of the beloved aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey — they called themselves the Mutual Admiration Society (MAS). It’s what others would call them, Sayers argued, so why not run with it?

Not that the name was entirely ironic. Years later, the writer Vera Brittain — a Somerville contemporary of the group, but not one of its members — recalled that the MAS “took themselves very seriously”. In Mutual Admiration Society, historian Mo Moulton, too, affords the group’s members the same sober respect that they afforded themselves, painting a rich portrait of the enduring friendship between four of them.

The most famous of the quartet is Sayers, who as well as her career as a detective novelist, was also an advertising copywriter — she worked on the “My goodness, my Guinness!” campaign — playwright, essayist and theologian. Then there’s Charis Frankenburg (née Barnett) who, after training as a midwife, became an outspoken birth control advocate, child-rearing expert and author of Common Sense in the Nursery (1922). Muriel St. Clare Byrne was a playwright — with Sayers, she co-wrote Busman’s Honeymoon, in which Wimsey and Harriet Vane finally tie the knot — and historian of the Tudor era. Finally there’s Dorothea Ellen Hanbury Rowe, an English teacher and founder of the “experimental” and popular Bournemouth Little Theatre Club.

However interesting their lives, it has to be acknowledged that Frankenburg is the only one who strictly “remade the world for women”, as the book’s subtitle explicitly claims. Despite opposition from the local Catholic church, in 1926 she set-up a birth-control clinic above a Salford bakery where women — officially, at least, the clinic only treated married women who had been pregnant at least once — could be fitted with diaphragms. At the time, this was genuinely life-changing stuff.

The first 108 patients had collectively experienced 509 pregnancies, one had been pregnant 18 times (including three miscarriages, and four babies who’d died as infants) by the time she was 41.

Not that the lives and work of the other three were inconsequential. The world around them was changing. They were among the first women to be awarded degrees, and to be allowed to vote. And in their own ways — some more publicly and forcefully, others unobtrusively and intimately — they pushed against old conventions. Frankenburg was a married mother of four, but her relationship with her husband was surprisingly equal for the day and age, and her advocacy for birth control was part of the broader women’s movement. Sayers had an illegitimate child, and when she did marry, it was to a chronically ill divorcé, so she was the family breadwinner. Rowe, meanwhile, was something of a “subversive spinster”, “a single woman who built enduring community and bonds of kinship around herself outside of the norms of the family”. While Byrne lived with her partner Marjorie Barber (Bar), a domestic set-up that for a while became a ménage à trois with the addition of Byrne’s lover Susan.

One could argue, Moulton suggests, that each woman “lived a queer life, in that they refused neat categories and pushed beyond the boundaries of feminine womanhood in 20th-century Britain.”

This isn’t to say that they would necessarily have embraced such categorisation themselves. Sayers maintained an incredibly close, loyal and loving friendship with both Byrne and Bar, but this didn’t stop her also declaring more generally that “inverts make me creep”. Moulton’s project, however, isn’t to try and claim these women as something they weren’t, but viewing their lives through a 21st-century lens does illuminate our understanding of how societal change is an often slow and quietly won process.

Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L Sayers and Her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women, by Mo Moulton, Corsair, RRP£20/Basic Books, RRP$30, 384 pages

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