Mo Moulton's group biography focuses on four women who attended Somerville College Oxford and, there, in 1912, founded the Mutual Admiration Society. There were a dozen members, but the four chosen for study here enjoyed lifelong friendships, later in their lives self-deprecatingly referring to themselves as the Middle Age Spread Society. The most famous of the four is Dorothy Leigh Sayers, who has had more than one biography all to herself, but her fame has enabled Moulton cleverly to persuade a publisher to commission a book to include the histories of three less famous characters: Muriel St. Clare Byrne (1895–1983), Charis Frankenburg (1892–1985), and Dorothea Rowe (1892–1988). And this is a coup to be applauded: as George Eliot comments at the end of Middlemarch, “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts” (1965, 896).

This is perhaps especially apt for Charis Barnett, not herself Jewish, but who married Sydney Frankenburg, the scion of a prominent and well-off Jewish family in Manchester. Consequently, Frankenburg did not have to earn her own living, having servants and access to good schools for her four children, so she was free to channel her formidable intelligence and energy into the birth control movement. In 1926, she opened the Manchester, Salford, and District Mothers Clinic, notwithstanding a storm of public controversy. She was a shrewd operator, taking her baby with her to fund-raising meetings to illustrate that the birth control movement was not anti-birth, but rather valued improving the health and welfare of both mothers and babies by spacing out births. Poor women in particular, Frankenburg demonstrated, were suffering from multiple pregnancies, miscarriages, and infant deaths. Women working in factories needed to control their reproduction, as otherwise, she argued, they would turn to desperate measures, such as backstreet abortions, in response to too many pregnancies.

Whereas, for many Somerville women, teaching secondary school was often a painful experience, with marriage the only escape, Dorothea Rowe was a career teacher, gifted and inspirational. As well as being the full-time head of an English department, in 1929, she founded Bournemouth Little Theatre Club; she saw no reason why a seaside town should not enjoy and sustain a theater that took its audience seriously. The theater boasted five hundred seats and a green room, changing its name in 1935 to the Palace Court Theatre. Some of the plays she put on there were unabashedly feminist; her productions received critical praise and general recognition that the theater was working far above amateur standard.

What had begun in Oxford, the reading and discussing of each other's apprentice literary works at cocoa parties in their rooms, continued long past their student years. Muriel St. Clare Byrne was a playwright and Tudor historian who, in 1925, published her first book, Elizabethan Life in Town and Country. In the interwar years, there was a widespread revival of interest in the Tudor period, and Byrne took advantage of this to write about the daily life of ordinary people. In 1932, she found a collection of letters belonging to Arthur Plantagenet that led to her life's work; her edited collection remains a standard reference work in early modern British history.

For women who had enjoyed an elite education, it was inevitable that it might be problematic to establish personal relationships that would not simply mimic those of previous generations, where men went out and earned the money and the women ran the house and managed the children. Charis Frankenburg's marital relationship was, arguably, the most traditional, although her husband shared her principles and respected his wife's public role, even though it was a controversial one. For Dorothy L. Sayers, it might have been useful if she had earlier listened to Frankenburg's study of safe birth control methods, as she had an illegitimate child whom she kept secret for many years, leaving him to be brought up by a spinster cousin. Sayers’ first novel, Whose Body, published in 1922, introducing Lord Peter Wimsey as the brilliant amateur detective, was a hit, and by the time she got married she had gained a large readership, and the fame and money that went with this. Probably as a consequence, her marriage was somewhat fraught; she was the major breadwinner, and this was experienced with some resentment by her husband Mac. At Oxford, same-sex “pashes” were commonplace; Frankenburg and Sayers both enjoyed them. Byrne suffered more intense ones, and much later she established a long-standing marriage-like relationship with Marjorie Barber, another Somervillian, who was an English teacher and author, although she also enjoyed another (reluctantly accepted by Barber) with Susan Cullis, a tutor at Bedford College. Dorothea Rowe never married: her legacy was her former pupils, who never forgot her teaching, and the theater she had founded.

As Somerville was only thirty-three years old in 1912 when the women started their university life, the members of the Mutual Admiration Society could still be regarded as pioneers. Leaving Somerville and the intellectual community that had fostered them was somewhat painful to each of the Mutual Admiration Society, as they negotiated their different ways into adult life. Of the four, Byrne conformed most to the image of a scholar, albeit she was never a university don, but stitched together a career of casual lecturing at both the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and Bedford College. All four women, although broadly speaking conservative in politics, were interested in reaching a wider rather than an elite audience, whether in literature, or, in Frankenburg's case, by educating poor women as well as middle-class women about child care. Similarly, Moulton has written a book that, although appropriately academic in that it footnotes all of its sources, will undoubtedly appeal to a wider audience. The tracking of the lives of these early Somerville students serves as an intensely engrossing tranche of social history.