Group biographies are difficult, with so many threads of life stories to manage while drawing out of them common themes. So when they are done well, they are all the more admirable. The self-named Mutual Admiration Society was a group of 5-8 young women students at Somerville College, Oxford in the early days of women’s education at Oxford, before women were even allowed to pursue degrees. Author Mo Moulton traces their lives from Somerville on, and the women become objects lessons about how wrong academics were to think that education was wasted on young women. Not only were these women lifelong feminists and friends and supports to one another, they contributed to women’s access to birth control and maternal care, theater, philosophy of religion, Tudor history, and detective fiction. The most well-known MAS member was Dorothy L. Sayers, creator of fictional sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey and his cohort Harriet Vane, but the other women of accomplishment do not get short shrift. “The work of the MAS forms a profoundly optimistic project,” Moulton writes. This project “insists that our birthright, as human beings, encompasses the full range of culture, and that even our most quixotic or futile efforts are ennobled, so long as they are defined by that integrity that links head and heart” (295). These women deserved this serious treatment and their work reminds us that all our efforts make a difference in the lives of someone.