Dorothy L. Sayers and her contemporaries were pioneers in numerous ways, first as female students at Oxford University, entering Somerville College in the pre-World War I era when women could take courses but were not eligible for Oxford degrees. Sayers and some of her fellow members of the Mutual Admiration Society, a loosely organized group of students with literary aspirations, were included in the first group of women to receive retroactive degrees in 1920.
A list of “main characters” and “supporting cast” helps the reader keeps the personnel straight. Sayers (1893-1957), best known of the group for her detective fiction featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, plus her religious drama and translations of Dante, had a short life compared to most of her fellow MAS members. Most familiar of the other three main subjects was Muriel St. Clare Byrne (1895- 1993), a Tudor Era historian and Sayers’ collaborator on the stage version of Busman’s Honeymoon, which preceded the novel. Longest lived was Dorothea Rowe (1892- 1988), a lifetime English teacher and a major figure in Britain’s community theater movement, founding the influential Bournemouth Theater Club. Charis Ursula Frankenburg (1892-1985), who worked at times as a midwife and a magistrate was a prominent spokesperson for birth control and the author of books on parenting. At a time that feminism and attitudes about the roles of women, sexuality, and definitions of family were in flux, all four of these MAS members held some views that would be out of step with today’s political correctness. But there’s no doubt they were important influencers from their college days through two World Wars and after. Some of the battles they fought still are not fully won. All of these women come alive for the reader in this exhaustively researched book, which includes over 40 pages of source notes.
Of particular interest to detective fiction fans is the account of the Sayers/Byrne collaboration on Busman’s Honeymoon. The reader also gets a good idea of what Sayers’ religious plays on stage and radio were like and an insight into the religious impulse they came from.
In an unusually strong year for Edgar nominations in the biographical/critical category, this outstanding work of feminist history and collective biography may well be the winner. (By the time you read this, you’ll know if I was right or wrong.)
