As a beautifully pieced patchwork of fascinating archival material from 21 libraries and collections on two continents, MAS (as Moulton calls the group, and as I’ll call the book) combines immense narrative interest with delightful detail. It practically begs to be made into a miniseries featuring dashing women in trousers, neckties, tea gowns, and/or academic gowns—complete with vaguely bohemian London flats, rainy train stations, lesbian love triangles, secret love children, cute cats, devoted dogs, pastoral picnics, and tragic telegrams. Though some of the women stipulated that certain personal papers should be destroyed, the towering boxes of letters, journals, newspaper clippings, theater programs, photographs, and manuscripts that survived clearly provided Moulton with everything that was necessary to reanimate the women’s voices and perspectives. MAS is also an illuminating work of analysis that engages substantively with and contributes to scholarship on women’s history, queer history, and the histories of childhood, friendship, and higher education. And it provides literary-critical thrills to fans and scholars of DLS, offering fresh ways to read the Peter Wimsey mysteries Busman’s Honeymoon (often considered a minor or marginal work in the Sayers canon) and Gaudy Night (commonly acknowledged as one of DLS’s greatest achievements). By placing these texts primarily in the context of DLS’s network of friendships, Moulton makes them new.

... a glowingly egalitarian tale despite seeming to have one standout star ... Through extensive research and in leanly eloquent prose, Moulton brings this grand, snarky, fiercely intelligent old group alive on the page, drawn together as much by their shared passions as by their shared obstacles ... glows with life, even though Moulton is always unblinkingly clear about the limitations these women faced ... a wonderful, inviting work of scholarship and a reconstruction long overdue - and of course a must-read for DLS’s legion of fans.

...at times this rigorous writer, examining people who took their work but not themselves that seriously, risks sounding like a teacher confronting a class of unruly girls ... the terrain the book sets out to cover is so broad and so complex—nothing less than British society and private life through two world wars and beyond as reflected in these women’s careers and domestic partnerships—that there is little time for lighthearted diversions. Moreover, The Mutual Admiration Society is not just a group biography, that most unwieldy of forms; it is also, at first glance, a manifesto ... From youth to maturity, the writer and the woman emerge intermittently yet strikingly here, surrounded by remarkable friends, who might say of their work, as Sayers did of one of her creations, 'it is, in its small way, right.'

Each [woman], Moulton argues, gave something back in exchange for her Oxford degree. Believing in women’s equality, they quietly, and in their own ways, fought for a truly democratic culture by pushing boundaries in reproductive rights, definitions of the family and sexual identity. This is a hard case to prove ... Because Moulton’s interest is solely in the community of friendship, we get little sense of each woman’s private character or interior life, which is doubtless how they would have wanted it. Loyalty 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 ... A blend of group biography and social history, Mutual Admiration Society tells a quintessentially English story in a slightly plodding way.

If they did, indeed, remake the world of women, as Moulton claims, they did not remake it as profoundly or as dramatically as their overtly political sisters, including Emmeline Pankhurst, who were suffragettes, who were arrested and jailed, and who won the right to vote for British women—not all at once but gradually ... has some of the ambiance of Downton Abbey. It could be transformed into a drama for Masterpiece Theater ... Readers might like to know what working class women in the East End of London were doing in this same time period ... Moulton moves deftly from Sayers to D. Rowe, to Frankenburg and the others, and also transports them graceful though the decades, though surely there was a way to be less circumspect about sex and gender. Now and then there are insightful comments are Sayers and Mac, for example, who apparently slept not only in separate beds, but separate rooms. A reader cries out for more ... Despite the limitations and omissions, The Mutual Admiration Society offers valuable information about Sayers’ career as a detective novelist who created the aristocratic sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, a whimsical character, indeed, who has pleased legions of TV viewers ... While The Mutual Admiration Society weighs in a bit too heavily on the pedantic side of storytelling, the details definitely take readers back to a time and place that no longer exists, except in fiction and history.

... [an] engrossing group biography ... Without glossing over moral failures like racism or anti-Semitism, Moulton celebrates the efforts of her subjects to shape their changing world in ways that would offer women—themselves included—a wider range of creative, intellectual, and social possibilities ... Moulton, with a keen eye for humorous detail and moments of humanity, deftly captures not only the lives of these women but also the enduring power of female friendship.

In this well-researched group biography, Moulton...follows four pillars of the 'society' as they challenged stereotypes of women throughout their lives ...The drawback to this approach is that Sayers was the star from the start, and a surfeit of prosaic details about her friends and their outliers makes for a slow-paced story, further encumbered with redundancies....and unedifying exposition ... Still, Moulton offers telling glimpses of Sayers ... Lord Peter Wimsey’s creator upstages her companions as they blaze trails for women.