Square Haunting

by Francesca Wade

  Power was entranced by Alexandria’s bazaars and open workshops, where she watched merchants at the roadside welding fine gold chains or weaving delicate tassels for vibrantly coloured scarves. In India she was entertained at dinners by politicians, journalists and reformers – regularly the only woman present – and noted in her University of Cambridge pocket diary that she ‘enjoyed the novel experience of hearing problems of government discussed in terms of “I”’. It was a fascinating time to be immersed in the country’s political life, as activists campaigned to overhaul British colonial rule and reclaim a national identity: Power was eager to learn all she could about the methods and motivations of the new independence movement, which had launched that summer to huge popular support. On 21 December, she refused an invitation from a genteel colonial administrator to a dance at his club (‘I would not be a lady of leisure in India in worlds,’ she insisted to a friend) and instead dodged through the heaving crowds to take a seat at the Nagpur Congress. There, she became one of only six Europeans present to witness the assembly vow to adopt the wholesale policy of non-cooperation, as urged by Mahatma Gandhi, the ‘saintly’ figure whom she was delighted – as a committed pacifist and member of the Labour Party – to meet briefly in Delhi, where they sat on the floor and discussed the futures of their countries. On leaving the city, Power travelled north to the Khyber Pass – a key part of the ancient Silk Road which connected Europe with the great markets of India and China – only to find that its passageway was, under a British by-law, closed to ladies. Her hosts received an angry letter from border officials when it was discovered that Power, undeterred, had made the crossing in male disguise.

  ‘I found myself deeply interested in and charmed with all these countries,’ wrote Power in her eventual report to the fellowship trust, ‘but my heart is irrevocably given to China.’ Power spent two months in China, at a moment of fundamental social and political change. Industry and education were fast transforming, a new phonetic script was facilitating a revolution in contemporary literature, and young women were agitating for the vote ‘more stridently than ever did the suffragettes’. Visiting the British colonies there and in India, speaking to locals and to government representatives, Power began to grasp for the first time the human impact of the British Empire, as a complicated reality beyond ‘the historical textbook or the debating society’. At first hand, she observed the fact that ‘gigantic Western rivalries are creating more & more problems in the East’; despite this, she left the country convinced ‘that China can become a great modern power, should she seriously desire to do so’. Power’s travels furnished her with a spirit of curiosity and empathy that would inform all her subsequent work, and a determination to write history which would reach far beyond her immediate surroundings. ‘The A. K. fellowship has been my ruin,’ she wrote to her fellow medievalist George Gordon Coulton, ‘for my heart will stray outside its clime & period. I think I shall have to compromise by working at the trade between Europe and the East in the Middle Ages.’

  *

  The letter Power received on 4 December 1920, having discovered three weeks’ mail waiting for her at the Thomas Cook office in Madras, was from the London School of Economics, where she had spent two years as a student. It contained the offer of a lectureship in economic history, to start the following autumn. Power had read in the Times of India the ‘perfectly disgusting’ news that Cambridge had rejected a proposal to follow Oxford in granting women full membership of the university and, like Jane Harrison, felt disillusioned and betrayed by the institution where she had spent a decade studying and teaching. ‘I never felt so bitter in my life,’ she wrote to Lilian Knowles, professor of economic history at the LSE. ‘Oxford only got degrees and women only got votes because these measures sailed through on the crest of the wave of sentiment over women’s war work. We let that moment pass, and now the wave has broken and people see the obvious truth that women are worth what they always were worth and no more. We think that covers and has always covered degrees and votes, but male public opinion at bottom doesn’t.’ On Christmas Eve, she replied tentatively to the LSE, expressing her hope – just as Harrison had insisted to Newnham – that her time would not be entirely swallowed by teaching, but that the position would entail plenty of time for pure research (‘the thing which I really care about’). She received assurances, and on 6 March, from a boat passing between Rangoon and Shanghai, she wrote formally to accept the job. Sailing later from Japan to Canada – where she was accompanied by Bertrand Russell and his pregnant partner, Dora Black, their animated discussion of politics, literature and feminism interrupted by the flashes from a bevy of journalists trying to photograph Russell – she wrote to her friend Margery Spring Rice to remonstrate on the difficulty of making such an important decision so far away from home.

  ‘I thought it was time for me to change my way of life, so when they wrote & offered me the job (I didn’t apply for it) I said yes,’ Power explained. ‘I hesitated a lot, because it would mean a lot more teaching than I’ve done before & the screw is only £500 – but I want to be in London for a bit … So I shall go into digs for a term or so & look for someone nice to share a flat with. I’d rather live alone, but don’t think I can afford it: I’ve got so many books that I couldn’t fit into too wee a flat. So if you can think of anyone who would do for me or hear of a nice flat in Bloomsbury, let me know … I have got some lovely furniture & hangings in China.’ To William Beveridge, principal of the school, she wrote that she looked forward to starting this fresh phase of life, with new students and colleagues, and a chance to employ some insights from her travels. ‘You need not be afraid lest I should not throw myself into the work,’ she assured him, ‘because I invariably become violently interested in the things which I am doing!’

  Power ended her journey by travelling through Boston, where she had arranged to meet H. D.’s friend Amy Lowell, whose work she greatly admired. (‘I rather begrudge every moment when you are not writing poetry,’ wrote Power, demurring to take up too much of her heroine’s time.) In September 1921, she returned to London via New York, starting her new job just ten days later. She took a temporary room in Belgravia, but towards the end of the year her thoughts turned to a more permanent home. On 30 January 1922, she wrote to Coulton of her delight at finding a ‘quite perfect’ place to live with a teacher friend, Marion Gertrude Beard, which seemed to hold within it the promise of an exciting new independence:

  I am extremely jubilant at present, because I have, after much travail & tribulation, found a charming half-house in Mecklenburgh Square, looking on to an enormous garden of trees, & I hope to move in at the end of term. I have found a convenient friend to share it, of the sort who is never there except on weekends, when I am often away. My idea of life is to have enormous quantities of friends, but to live alone. And I do not know whether Girton or the study of medieval nunneries did more to convince me that I was not born to live in a community!

  *

  We don’t know a lot about Eileen Power, the private woman. After her sudden death in 1940, at the age of just fifty-one, her sisters burned most of her personal papers, leaving little more material for biographers than Jane Harrison did; though both these women were dedicated to recovering forgotten histories, and lived bold and fascinating lives, they allowed their own pasts to be expunged, for reasons unknown. At any rate, after she joined the LSE and became a public figure of international reputation, Power’s long, witty, matter-of-fact outpourings to Margery died out, and in her archive at Girton the thick folders packed with closely filled pages of handwriting are replaced by thin portfolios of short, professional correspondence, interspersed with reams of notes and plans for lectures, seminars, articles, broadcasts and books. Tantalising fragments of personality glimmer through others’ memories: that she loved jazz, but instantly resigned membership of Soho’s Gargoyle Club when it didn’t let her enter with her friend Paul Robeson, the African American actor (who starred in the avant-garde 1930 f
ilm Borderline alongside H. D. and Bryher); that she was asked to contribute a short biography to Who’s Who, where she listed her interests as ‘travelling and dancing’; that she spent her earnings on modern jewellery and beautiful dresses from Parisian salons, to the bafflement of the less sartorially inclined Girton dons (‘I certainly feel there is something radically wrong with my clothes from an academic point of view,’ she told Margery). But these personal details provide less a revelation of an inner life than an insight into the ways she wanted others to see her. Power’s public presentation was always carefully constructed: she sought to position herself simultaneously as a woman and a serious scholar, negotiating – as others had done before her, and continue to do – the bind which ensured that ‘feminine’ appearance and preoccupations would, to the wider world, diminish the respect she commanded as a professional at the forefront of her field.

  Eileen Power lecturing at Girton, circa 1915

  The obituaries – mostly by male historians – comment approvingly on how ‘lightly carried’ her knowledge was, how admirably she ‘made no parade of her learning’. The eminent economic historian John Harold Clapham wrote, as if this was a surprising achievement from a distinguished faculty member, that Power could ‘hold her own in conversation with any tableful of men’, though hastened to add that she ‘hardly looked, or usually talked, the professor’. The historian and diplomat Charles Webster remembered ‘an audible gasp of surprise’ when Power, radiant in a glamorous evening gown, arrived late to a dinner in her honour at Harvard, and the table of hoary scholars realised ‘that this enchanting creature was the learned lady whom they had come to meet’. G. G. Coulton recalled first meeting Power when she accosted him in the street and asked for advice on sources for the lives of medieval women; he openly admitted that, noticing her stylish clothes and easy charm, he ‘took it for granted that this was one more fashionable girl with a momentary enthusiasm for “research”’. It was two years later, when he read her seven-hundred-page study of medieval nunneries and found it ‘incomparably better in quality than anything of the kind that has been done on this subject before or since in any European language’, that he realised the error of his initial assumption. Power saw no reason why an interest in clothes and a sense of humour could not be combined with professional rigour. But it’s sobering to wonder how many more ‘fashionable girls’ may have abandoned their ‘enthusiasms’ on recognising that pursuing an academic career would require them to justify themselves at every juncture.

  These men were Power’s friends and collaborators; in life, they loved and supported her. Yet their words reveal that Eileen Power was an anomaly to them; an honorary member of their group, accepted graciously once she had proven herself, but only then by dint of how truly exceptional they considered her scholarship and personality. To some extent, she seems to have revelled in such presumptions, playing up her femininity with confidence that her wit and academic prowess would make a fool of anyone who underestimated her. Yet her sense of frustration remains palpable. Power was aware that she was consistently paid less than her male contemporaries: that while she was invited on international lecture tours and offered honorary degrees from respected universities, she had to ask for raises and promotions. Even when appointed professor, a position with international prestige and further administrative burdens, her salary rose only in small increments not commensurate with the long hours she devoted to her work. The vacancy to which Power was appointed in 1921 had been originally intended as a readership commanding a salary of £800; when Power was approached she was offered, instead, the position of lecturer at £500 a year. When she accepted the job, she expressed her hope that this offer was only the beginning, ‘because I can’t possibly continue for long making only that in a non-resident post in London. I do not really think it is good enough for the amount of work.’ Her determination to extend education outside the academy, producing public lectures, broadcasts, children’s books and popular articles, kept her scholarly output lower than might be expected; she had little interest in turning out dry tomes written only for other academics ‘like the community in the political economy book,’ as she wrote in an article, ‘who earned a precarious livelihood by taking in one another’s washing’. Much of her work survives only in the form of notes or unpublished lectures; a large and important facet of her legacy is intangible, residing in the form of impressions made on children in their formative years.

  Power was very conscious that, as Jane Harrison put it in 1914, ‘the virtues supposed to be womanly are in the main the virtues generated by subordinate social position’. Like Dorothy L. Sayers, who wrote in her caustic 1938 essay ‘Are Women Human?’ that it was ‘repugnant … to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person’, Power railed against the social system which ‘is so anxious for people to be correct that it effectually prevents them from being true’. In an early essay entitled ‘Women at Cambridge’, Power recalled being asked to provide a ‘woman’s perspective’ on a problem, and argued, in terms strikingly similar to those Sayers often used, that ‘a woman’s outlook on art and science has nothing specifically womanly about it, it is the outlook of a PERSON … The difference is between good books and bad books, straight-thinking books and sentimental books, not between male books and female books.’ Eileen Power’s life is the story of her attempt to forge a new image for a woman intellectual, and create a way of living for which there was little precedent: not as the stereotype of a dowdy bluestocking, but as a professional who could entertain an international reputation while also enjoying fashion and frivolity, whose public status was defined not by her family but by her work. Just as H. D. wanted to find a universal voice unmarked by gender, or as Sayers pondered a suitable balance for women ‘cursed with both hearts and brains’, Eileen Power sought the freedom to be contradictory and yet whole, to live richly and excitingly, ‘extracting all I can from life’.

  Throughout her eighteen years in Mecklenburgh Square, Power balanced her desire to live untrammelled by social expectations with a wider commitment that the same privilege be extended to people of all races, nations and classes. And the strength of her ideals was not unnoticed by those around her, who looked to her as a role model. Judith de Márffy-Mantuano was a student at the LSE from 1926 to 1929, having arrived alone from Hungary and looked up the school in the telephone book; her parents, though extremely wealthy, had given her no allowance for her studies, considering them a waste of time, so Power (her tutor) took her in when she couldn’t afford a flat of her own. ‘At her house in 20 Mecklenburgh Square,’ Judith wrote later, ‘I began to make out – like a skyline breaking through a lifting fog – the shape of another world … It was a world in which men and women did not belong to classes, but were individuals, and succeeded each according to his merit. Eileen Power herself exemplified for me the possibilities open to women.’

  *

  In 1908, as an undergraduate at Cambridge, Eileen Power wrote a spoof fairy tale called ‘The Intractable Princess’, which she dedicated to her director of studies, and illustrated with deft cartoons of a cheerful, bucktoothed damsel. A king and queen ruled over ‘the red city of Girton’. All the goddesses came to the christening of their daughter Eileen, bringing with them their blessings, except for Bellona, goddess of war, who was fighting battles in a far-flung land; her absence ensured ‘that the Princess Eileen grew up a pacifist’. When the princess refuses the suitor to whom her parents have betrothed her, they lock her in a tower. She’s rescued by the Girton shopkeeper, who expects her to marry him, as ‘any self-respecting heroine would do’, in exchange for this ‘enormous amount of trouble’. But Princess Eileen refuses. She hails a passing Zeppelin and asks for a lift; the bemused pilot asks her if she’s sure she wants to travel with a Hun, but she blithely replies, ‘We’re internationalists!’ They escape to China, and live ‘happily unmarried ever after’.

  As a form of autobiography, the sketch provides a neat illustration of Power’
s lifelong political values as well as her sharp humour: her abiding feminism, pacifism and internationalism are all present, as is her commitment to her own independence. Born in 1889, Eileen Power’s upbringing – in Altrincham, near Manchester – was overshadowed by a scandal which sundered her family when she was three, and left a sense of shame and disillusionment with patriarchal authority. Her stockbroker father was caught forging clients’ signatures to raise loans to himself totalling £28,000 (the equivalent of £3.5 million today). He was declared bankrupt and imprisoned for fraud. Eileen’s mother, Mabel Grindley Clegg, facing destitution, moved with her daughters to Bournemouth. Out of loyalty to her mother, or her own anger, Eileen never saw her father again and rarely spoke of him to friends, though she later mentioned off-hand to Margery the residual fear of finding him ‘pirouetting in the daily press at any moment’. When Eileen was fourteen, her mother died of tuberculosis, leaving instructions that her daughters should receive the best education possible. Eileen and her younger sisters, Rhoda and Beryl, moved to Oxford to live with their aunts and grandfather. Determined to ensure their wards’ future independence – and perhaps aware that the disgrace made advantageous marriage unlikely – these relations stretched their own finances to send the girls to Oxford High School, an academically rigorous institution with a strong record of sending pupils to university (and where, coincidentally, Jane Harrison had taught for a term in 1880). In 1907, their foresight was rewarded: Eileen received a scholarship to Girton College, Cambridge, where she ended three years’ study with an unofficial first class in history.