Published earlier this month. The doctor is a history of 20th century britain and ireland specifically interested in gender, sexuality, colonialism and post colonialism. They earned their phd from Brown University and worked for a number of years in history and Literature Program at harvard. Currently mollton is a senior lecturer in the History Department at the university of birmingham. Lastly, they have written one previous book entitled ireland and the irish which is published in 2014. The Mutual Admiration Society centers on the writer dorothy l. Sayers and five friends who founded a writing group in 1912 at college oxford. Sayers and her classmates entered oxford at a time when women could receive an education but not degrees, but in october of 1920, they became some of the first women to fully graduate. These women pushed the boundaries in other ways as well, working to forward womens rights in reproduction, the arts and clear family making. Looking to overcome the extremely restrictive sexism of the time, the women of the Mutual Admiration Society are still an inspiration to us today and we can follow their example as we work to a more equal society. And here to tell us more about them is the author. [applause] thank you very much and thank you for coming out on an incredibly cold tuesday night. It is an honor to be back in Harvard Square doing this event. I taught for six years in the history Literature Program here and so i feel like im in the shadow of the communities that actually where the first idea of this book was born. Especially useful to be back here because it is itself a book about community and about relationships and how being in community and having these relationships help us to become more than what we might otherwise be, help us to grow and help us to transcend the boundaries that might otherwise be in place. Its also as the introduction alluded to, its also a book sort of what happens a day after a revolution. Dorothy l. Sayers and her friends lived at this moment when they got to witness a lot of famous firsts in the history of feminism. They were part of the first generation of women in britain to be able to vote in parliamentary elections. They were part of the first cohort of women to be granted degrees by Oxford University. They saw the first women sitting on british juries and so on. There was a bit of a legislative revolution that happens in this moment. And so part of what i wanted to explore in writing this book is what happens when were given access to a world but still isnt actually built for us. A world that has seen maybe a legislative revolution start, but not really a full social transformation. The answer to that question is partly community and the space that these women made for each other. So this book started it kind of started on an airplane. It started when i bought a novel by sayiers published, one of the most beloved sayers novel. It featured lord peter whimsey and garden night is set in somerville college, which is a Womens College at Oxford University, and so i bought it as airplane reading coming back to cambridge from the conference. The first thing i want to say is watch out because airplane reading can actually change your life. I read this book and i was blown away by the way that it was a story of intellectual integrity in a female scholarly community, and as soon as i got off the plane, i wanted to know who these women were. It was so clear that this wasnt just a work of complete imagination, but it was describing real relationships, real community. And so i started diving into sayers biographies and becoming fairly frustrated because i was finding a lot about Dorothy Sayers as a mother, as a wife, as somebody who had relationships with a series of men. I didnt find a lot about her female friendships, and so being a historian, i then started investigating those women, those female friendships, and what i found was that it turned out theyre amazing, the women who were in her life. So the book focuses on the friendships that she made at Oxford University and especially four key women who formed this group the Mutual Admiration Society. Thats what they called themselves. We will get to why in a minute. It focuses on four of them who stayed friends throughout their lives, so dorothy l. Sayers, she wrote detective fiction. She also was an advertiser. She became a theologian as well and a play wright. A popular historian of england and also a play wright. Dorothy row. I call her d row in this book. The parents of late Victorian Britain were not too original in their naming. So dorothy row who founded an amateur theater and became an english teacher and also the social glue of the group who became a midwife, a writer of parenting advice manuals, a justice of the peace and a variety of other sort of exciting things. And the book also touches on a few other people who were involved in the book, a woman who became a pioneering Science Fiction writer and another woman who became an english professor in pennsylvania. So i want to start by giving you an introduction to this group at summerville college. So when theyre first meeting, give you a flavor of what they were like, the way that they were both serious and quite fun loving and silly and whacky in all sorts of ways. The first recorded meeting of the Mutual Admiration Society took place on november 6, 1912, and is noted in the diary, dls read two of her works whose titles reveal or ongoing infatuation with medieval themes. Another reading took place where she and jim read their work. The club was also baptized saying if we didnt get ourselves that title of Mutual Admiration Society, the rest of college would. She wasnt wrong. The mas earned some little digs that year going down play, which is a sort of lighthearted play that the class put on each year. Another novelist who never joined the groups ranks remarked 20 years later that they took themselves quite seriously and apparently still do. They also though enjoyed the gruesome and the erie. One dull evening in mid january, they found themselves with time on their hands as they waited for a someone to return from england. They crept in her room, hair pins for nose, mouth, stocking and brush for hair, enhancing the realistic effects d row put cushions on its body and stuck a pair of shoes straight up at the end of the bed. The crowning touch was a pair of leather gloves hanging out over the sheet and holding a bottle with a label suicide by poison. Luckily she walked in during the preparations and was delighted. Perhaps inspired by the success of this practical joke, an elaborate ghost party was staged two days later. Summerville college she had learned had allegedly been built on the site of an old convent and was supposed to be haunted by the ghost of a nun, a legend that says much about the fear that too much education rendered a woman unmarriageable. Having sworn that she had seen this apparition herself one night on the stroke of 11 00, she invited eight other first year students to meet the ghost. She enlisted others in her aid but other guests including dls came to the party in all innocence. Dls contributed her own esoteric elements drawing on the threshold and preparing latin charms to use in case an exorcism was necessary. Today they sat and told tales of ghosts working themselves into a most frightfully creepy state with all sorts of grisly stories. As the clock struck 11 00, someone said i believe jim has arranged ghosts for us but d row quickly began a new story to create a distraction until the cry went around, theres something white. Dls saw outside the window a shadowy figure in the black and white garb of a nun. Others noticed that the figure carried a baby in her rooms. It was a woman dressed up in a white nightgown, black lace. She let out an erie howl. When she reached the window of the room where the party stood gathered, jim asked her into coffee and the game was up. The only person who wasnt the least annoyed and she may not really have been was Dorothy Sayers and phyllis was left to spend hours scrubbing off the paint. So i think that this group kind of gave they gave each other this space in this moment in oxford history when, you know, women were advocating for the right to full degrees and the right to full inclusion. It wasnt being granted yet. They were under an enormous amount of scrutiny and pressure to be proper and to prove that they belonged and werent going to transgress too many boundaries. I think being within this group allowed allowed these young women to experiment with different ways of being, with different ways of having an intellectual presence, and so to be more than they might otherwise have been in that kind of in the face of the strictures. So they finished their education in the midst of world war i, and between world war i and sort of the difficulties of getting launched in the 1920s, they grew apart for a while. And i think that thats the moment when as i was beginning the research of this book, i sort of worried that perhaps there was a set of nice stories about this group of friends in university, but was that the end of it . And they experienced lots of good reasons to be distracted from one another and to be sort of selfabsorbed during world war i and into the 1920s, so muriel, for instance, really wanted to be an academic, wanted to be in oxford. She was trying to get published, working as a schoolteacher and hated working as a schoolteacher. Dls sayers hated working as a schoolteacher, was trying to get her work published. She had a series of disastrous love affairs culminating in she got pregnant outside of wedlock and had a son that she chose to keep that pregnancy and that birth secret so the 20s were really difficult. Whats really striking and what i think is important is this sort of core group of four friends then reunited. They came back together and that reunion, that reconnection what was fuelled the transformation in their work and the deepening of their work and the things that we remember them for now. So i want to have just a short reading that i think gives a flavor of this feeling of reunion. I wrote down what page its on. Sometime in 1928 or very early 29, dls reached out to caris. She no longer needed help finding a place to foster her son who would grow up in her cousins home although he was informally adopted by her husband max fleming. She did however want advice on getting reliable birth control. Caris put her in touch with a doctor, a prominent doctor and friend of dr. Mary stopes as well as the author of a sex advice manual, as dls put it, by the way, many thanks for your suggestion with regard to the women doctor, etc. Dr. Wright was very nice and fixed me up quite satisfactorily, so thats that. Caris in return pressed dls to attend that years summerville feast. Oxford colleges hold feast at the Academic Year for the alumni. Dls was tempted telling mack i think i must go this year. Certainly he replied why not. But nine years after she had earned her oxford degree, returning had become a fraught ordeal for dls. She confessed to caris that she had delayed actually writing to make the arrangements. It is one of those deep inner repugnances that the psycho analysts are always talking about. I dont really want to go, she says, returning to past locations, rekindling old connections these things threatened to stir up emotions on subconscious level. She said she hated looking back, nostalgia, the whole business. She didnt want to think about her past self or to be encouraged to feel sentimental in the company of her former companions. I like for instance to see you and d row because you are both people whose company is in itself delightful, but my god, a college full of people with whom i have no other bond that in once we were all there together, even if she went, she said, everyone will say im just as intolerable as i was 15 years ago, and with every justification, i am. [laughter] at the end of the letter, dls told caris that she had finally written to summerville to request a room for the reunion. She said i will sing a song. I will even sit on the floor and talk jolly but i will not drink cocoa. There are limits. [laughter] unfortunately, i dont know if she actually drank cocoa when she went. I know she didnt sign the souvenir program. But i also know that in returning to summerville and in returning to that set of friendships that shed made as a university student, she embarked on this kind of transformation, the sort of intellectual journey of risk taking and vulnerability that led her work in really interesting directions. And that is true for the other women as well, but i want to focus on sayers for tonight because i think that the story the story of that reunion and where it led kind of answers one of the core paradoxes that has existed in sayers scholarship. So that paradox is dorothy l. Sayers writes all of these quite lighthearted detective novels and works as an advertising copy writer and then sometimes in the mid 30s starts writing novels that are fairly serious. They are still detective novels but have kind of an emotional heft to them. They explore serious questions. She then becomes a play wright, writes a cycle of plays about the life of jesus that get broadcast on the bbc. She becomes a theologian who writes really well regarded popular theology. She becomes somebody who learns enough medieval italian to be able to translate the first two sections of dantes divine comedy. Theres a sort of phase change. You know, theres a quantum leap, physics metaphors, she really transforms in what shes able to do. That hasnt really been explained by folks who have studied sayers work. If my book has a secret feminist agenda, it is to show that actually it is putting sayers back into the context of these female friendships that explains that transformation. So she rekindles her friendship with muriel and also with muriels partner marjorie barber who goes by the nickname barb, and its clear that the three of them spoke a lot about issues of work, how to live an ethical life, how to be an ethical relationship. Dls was struggling with her marriage at that time. She wasnt sure whether she should seek a divorce or not. She wasnt sure whether she wanted her son to be adopted by her husband. she had two lovers who were very important to her and so what they think is so important is that those conversations than informed a series of collaborations that they undertook and i think fueled his career. Ive a little bit more to read to you about that transformation around the late 1920s as they had this friendship with murial and barr she decided to introduce it into the store and let me read her words about that. She dragged her feet at the idea of introducing romance into her detective novels. Women and love stories and psychology were generally in crime story she said. But in 1930, seven years after the first appearance of her famous hero thela told murial she was getting a bit weary. That same year she published a novel that took the series in a new direction. Strong poison which fictionalizes the unhappy experiences with previous lover john introduces a proper hair one in herriot pain. It looked at her whimsy and brilliant damage hero of peel. She has been hurt by love of her intelligence carries her through. Harriet is more than a Love Interest. Instead they are both engaged in the struggle to reconcile the desires of heart and head but whats more harriet is a detective novelist herself struggles with the same problems how to make detective novels more mostly realistic while working within their comfortable narrative convention. She writes strong poison introduces a problem, a Love Interest in a detective novel and how to think about relationships seriously in this genre and she writes a series of novels that are totally brilliant and wellwritten in time if you havent read them that youve asked me nothing to advance these questions. She then jokes in the midst of it she says lord peter says hes anxious to get that harriet is Still Holding out on him pretty is now 42 but still active for his age and hopes to be for hes actually a it read i have to say she was 42 when she wrote that so speaking from experience. She stalls time with what shes going to do with these characters and its actually in conversation with murial in conversation with murial that she finds a solution. Murial has been working as a playwright trying to make a name for herself as a playwright. Somebody approached murial and set her hats youve read a novel based on one of, you bike to write a play based on one of sayers novels and she turned it down but said to sayer why dont we write a play together. And thela was sold and she said lets write a collaborative play pretend to pretend, 1935 thela visited muriel in london and every day they began to sketch the outlines of the play. That night we stayed up talking about the play business until early the next morning for the next day over lunch they mapped out a plan. At burial suggest and agree to use thelas proprietary characters complemented by new versions of the usual type and to write a collaborative play that would adapt her novel style to the stage. By the time thela left london in the outlier had emerged. The play was set in the honeymoon and only for charming coziness in the English Village but also for a fuller exploration of the relationship. It was obvious by then that harriet and peter needed to reinvent marriage in order for it to suit them. The honeymoon which became the title of the play would show them doing just that and they realize this would often mean given getting the character engaged on the page so fans could understand why harriet decided to accept one of many of peters proposals. Britain after that before was performed. Reading both gaudy night and the product of acquirers in between them changes the text. Its clear for one thing the lord peter winds and. Characters are not decicco projections. They are also composite fortunes capturing the conversation she had with murial and barr about relationships and love and work. In a sense meryl and barr become alternate moments for harriet and peter. Murial with her curly blond hair and are scattershot early and her moves and then grounded intelligence and her ruby cabochon ring exactly like the ring peter gave harriet and the honeymoon. Barr was a High School Teacher and her students passed a murmur that she had been given that ring by fiance that died in the work that this is probably mixing two things up. Rs was killed in 1918. Would be reasonable to imagine the ring was a gift from ariel this fiance who is invisible because of her, not her death. The writing was a true collaboration on this 50 50 in muriels words. Back home in essex thela consulted with her solicitor to confirm that the plot was realistic and she was key to conduct an experiment to ensure the murder machine was realistic to and i will get to a spoiler spoiler i promised them by february of 1916 thela had written 4000 words for act i. The pair spend another weekend together at the end of february and march there was a lunch in muriel went to stay for a few days in between the visits they spoke on the telephone and sent each other detailed draft and log letters with questions and ideas spread one sign charmingly your partner and guilt, dorothy sayer. Additions edits and staged both in their handwriting. In an interview at the press before the play opened thela argued that the honeymoon brought to speeches to the stage. First they follow the rules of the detection club. Every movement is done and laid in full sight of the audience so that the audience has as much chance as crime investigators to solving the problem. Second the Love Interest so extraneous and most plays is here an essential part of the theme. Both of these accomplishments were part one. I want to skip ahead to my favorite example of this collaborative process of making it something other than extraneous to a detective play. So this is part of where barr the coauthor of the play, she was a crucial interlocutor and she objected to the idea that peter in herriot had gone to this cottage in the country for the honeymoon and they discovered a murder there. They discovered a murder but r objects the idea that harriet and peter would share their wedding night on a dead mans mattress. Thela acted apologetic and she said tell barr im sorry about the brett richie been thinking pragmatically. They would choose a secondary bedroom in their own honeymoon cottage. Thela was willing to concede the point that point to cut it out and said they provided the airing of the mattress premier ariel thought the whole thing was funny. I feel sure it to air will naturally satisfy barr and ill limited to illustrates the way in which your female fans are mad about the boy and because he gave me a good laugh. But if barr was a standin for the female fans you is correct about the importance of getting the emotional resonance of the playwright. Thela struggle with this. The march 6 she had written a love seen it set for the infernal quotation. It is too shy making for words she told murial and kept on with the blank verse in such an unfortunate manner. What a problem to have. She briefly considered using a version of the line that would feature in gaudy night, we have calm to where the world sleeps upon its access axis the heart of rest. In the end she turns to murial terrified that the sun server play held. At the end of march she wrote to murial i think in the scene in my mind has been so set upon the construction of the thing the making a watertight that i have meant some of the necessary motions free she was a worried especially about the balance between comedy and the inevitable tragic news which he said is bound to creep in if the real murderer is going to be technic and hanged. Or tip the runway and it will become either heartless or he besieged marielle please dont mind altering anything at all if it seems to you weak or inadequate to adjust your judgment. There was a choral singer which was the emotional climax of the play. Here peter offers to give up his protection which he fears about the sector violence to serve in the honeymoon. Midapril thela was agonizing on how to get the tone exactly right. It will have to be frightfully earnest she said because harriet will never do that you are my lord and master and peter would have a fit if she did preacher wrote to murial i have made a valiant attempt to tackle the accursed scene. Its extremely pompous. In the final version. Simply insist peter must carry on with his work. What kind of life could we have if i knew the had become less than yourself by marrying me, she asks. If we disagreed we will fight it out like gentlemen but we wont stand for matrimonial black male. Traditional heterosexual marriage is founded on self falsities xion suggests here in the link something new peter in harriet will be like gentlemen honest with each other and in perching their work with integrity. In the end thela had created something did preacher told murial she was struck by the curious into me unconscious symmetry produced in act to when all the masks come off at once pretty dont want to exaggerate the event at all. It gives me comedy but i have a feeling since it worked out so naturally it is in its small way right. Publicly you saw this before i did read so i dedicated this book shows and family because i think that is what this group of friends became to each other. They were a web of connections that didnt only offer support but real space and opportunity for transformation, for growth and meaning. Its a term that fueled murials work, her ultimate six volumes of correspondence. If fueled the turned to theater and into theology and they think its was all of them to become fully human. That was a later collaboration that murial and bar sans was a series of essays that became famous under the title are women human . So its an easy joke to make that the spoiler is she answered yes women are human but whats important is that through becoming a kind of Family Network through each other, and through becoming a network of support and that mutual recognition to one another they were able to recognize each other as fully human and allow them to embark upon careers as serious work as women. I will stop there and i will be really happy to take questions. [applause] we are being videoed by cspan. If you are able and willing to, standup and be counted by the camera. Any questions. C how does one stand up . I am curious about the archival work for this as anyone who picks up the book will find out. What was the most interesting or exciting thing that you came across in the archives . There were lots of exciting things in the archives. One of the things that is true but writing this kind of history is a common thing that will be said is that its hard to write womens history. The sources dont exist. We cant find them and im sort of moving into a phase having worked on this book werent thinking where does this lead us in. In a way so interesting that theres a ridiculous source of the look for them. All of them wrote about their lives and in most cases face a lot of what they wrote or what was written to them. Particularly moving to me was claire burns collected an archive of her life. Had she lived in the 21st century she would have been avid for dissidents and social media. She would have done the influencer frankly. She would have been at the edge of all of the step are the boxes of photographs of herself, she also tests are correspondence, not what she wrote that what was written to her. As somebody who herself was aspiring to use correspondence, she saw me coming in me coming it away but she collected her own correspondent and edited her own correspondence. So she lived to a very old age. She was born in 1890s and she died in the 1980s. Given that kind of intentionality in her own archive i was really excited the day that i discovered an envelope. I didnt do any such thing, i opened it and it contained this really moving and honest series of letters from her other partner from the 1930s and also to the 1940s talking about their relationship and how they felt about each other and how they were navigating the layers of the need for secrecy both within their social circles and within the wider world. There were repeated references to burning outside of the ample but even the letters themselves are recompensed to, i know that you will bring this letter as soon as you receive it and i know youve asked me to bring your letters but i havent done it yet. I can imagine murial rereading these letters and reshuffling them and the data letter didnt match the date of the envelope would suggest they were taken out of the backend. And the relationship had most landed by the mid1940s and he kept them for another 40 years. They remained important to her. It evokes for me, both the surprising abundance of sources about things that we are told there are and verses four and also the wording in the fact that their archival collections. Murial yager was a fascinating person and i wish we knew more about her preacher quested and are well developed for papers be burned and her work and there were a couple of other examples like that. To me im so grateful it wasnt burned in and be a think of all the things that were burned at the same time. So a lengthy and slightly heavy answer. Rev adaptations of the story . I am not a watcher of adaptations at all and i know there are profound loyalties on the carmichael adaptation. So im going to come to a question by saying we need it added to the 21st century. Numerous novels are being reissued right now theres an issue with the beautiful new cover. We need sort of pbs to step up to the plate and have a new version. I will also say on line there is a clip from the additional production of the honeymoon. They give chu a sense out how different it was especially since there were lots of microphones everywhere. The plate version of honeymoon. Anything else . And make you described a remarkably cohesive criminality but i wonder what kind of tensions there might be between these people . Absolutely. I think that sayer complex life affected her relationship and all sorts of ways. The part of jim yager is a really interesting one because she is somebody who is really really close to thela in university and afterwards they considered sharing a room or a flat together in london in the early 1920s presaeb dedicates the first book to her to jim yager pucci said it was never staggered into existence without your assistance. They wrote a petition together pulp fiction together so this is sort of, guess its another example of the kind of really cool aberrations that came out of this group. At some point in the mid1920s that friendship just dims. Its not that murial yegor disappears preacher remains a somewhat fairly successful author. She stays an attenuated contact with some of the other members of the Mutual Admiration Society so she gets advice on writing plays from thoreau in the 1930s. A friendship with sayer is over and thats another mystery of sayers biography. We dont know stackley what happens there. The friendship seems to have ended after a holiday together shortly after sayer son was born. I suspect murial yegor in jen jaeger was a very school plainspoken person in the very he had very strong ideas. I expect that thela might have experimented with what if i told the secret to a friend which went really badly. She also wrote to this lover who i mentioned, she wrote about the difficulties of having a married lover and what was so difficult about it was she couldnt introduce her to her friends and her friends of that major isolated and lonely because she felt it would with them in a false position to introduce her to him and she didnt want to lie to them either so the fabric of the friendship which in the way makes it more moving to me that later on shes able to talk about the difficulties and able to not isolate herself. Navigating that transition to adulthood in adult relationships i think puts significant strain in a different sense i havent talked much about frankenberg although my secret hope is people will come to the book for sayers and stay for frankenberg predicts amazing. She raises for children who through shes a totally remarkable person. All of that though polls are also away from the group for a time and it isnt until her children are a bit older and hurl my fist changed in some ways but she stays close to thela the whole time. They stay friends for 60 years. By the end of their lives they are saying its a lot to travel to see one another but they do. In spite of those complexities they have a conversation. Im curious up with the most interesting thing you discovered in their early years that spurred them on into the rest of their lives, so what was the catalyst that you most enjoyed writing about . I think my favorite example of the kind of things they were doing with one another is they put on, they rewrote hamlet which right away to those you a lot about them, right . At this time the prince of wales is also a student at oxford and his slang nick name at the time was the prager wegher. This is some good ed worthy in playing. They called the prince of wales the prager wegher. What i love about it is its hilarious writing but its also a rewriting that gets rid of all the tragic misogyny of the actual play. It becomes a play in which the hamlet himself is dating a feel you and ophelia has been giving him presents but hes also been in debt for some reason in these been pondering the president. He starts getting stressed and he so stressed about the debt that hes occurring he becomes delusional and starts talking to himself but all the rest of the characters in the play, the king and the queen and all the friends and ophelia realized that hamlets running off the rails so they come up with an elaborate scheme involving a false dagger and snap him back to reality. The queen is looking forward happily to ophelia in hamlet heading off for their honeymoon. On one level its really silly and vero played hamlet. This is very much a joint production but i think it shows both engaged really deeply with the venerated high culture. They were being taught and they were afraid to subvert it, turned it into the most Popular Culture that then makes a serious point. On some level thats exactly what they kept doing for the rest of their careers. So hamlet a prager day here. I feel like its the right place to end. I will stop there. Thank you so much for coming out. 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