Square Haunting

by Francesca Wade

  Postan did return, sailing from Cape Town and arriving home at the end of July. But their long-awaited reunion was to be cut unbearably short. On 8 August 1940, while out shopping in the Oxford Street department store Bourne & Hollingsworth, Eileen Power collapsed with a heart attack, and died in an ambulance on the way to hospital. Accompanying her will – which included bequests of jewellery and Chinese gowns to her sisters and an allowance for the education of a friend’s daughter – Postan found a letter addressed to him, dated 30 May 1940. ‘You won’t get this unless I am dead,’ it began, ‘and how much I hope that you will never get it for I don’t want to be dead and I want desperately to pass the rest of my life with you.’ Power asked him to do two things: first, to finish his own half-written book; second, to publish the manuscript of her Ford Lectures, which she had lodged at her bank for safekeeping. The ending to her short letter recalls Virginia Woolf’s last words to her husband: ‘No man,’ wrote Power, ‘could ever have made a woman happier than you have made me.’

  It is one thing for women to become successful in their own times; it is another to ensure that their work is remembered after their deaths. With the exception of Woolf, whose memory was preserved methodically, in writing about these women I’ve faced difficulties of burned papers and vanished correspondences, which leave odd gaps in the record or retrospectively accord undue prominence to certain periods or friendships. During her life, Power was well known as a public intellectual, her high standing exemplified by the popularity of her lectures and BBC broadcasts, her eminent position at the LSE and the international demand for her teaching. ‘The loss to learning, literature, the world and her many friends is immense,’ wrote the historian G. M. Trevelyan to Postan in August 1940. ‘I know of no woman living who was her equal.’ But after her death, her reputation came to be overshadowed by the men who had worked with her. Power herself may have inadvertently sealed her fate when, in 1938, she decided not to apply for the chair in economic history at Cambridge that J. H. Clapham was vacating. She spoke wistfully of the honour of holding Clapham’s chair, and of the benefit to women that her appointment would secure, but she was reluctant to lose the sabbatical that the LSE had promised, and to leave the stimulus of London; besides, she had earmarked Postan for the position since 1932 and knew he would be a deserving recipient. ‘I am perfectly delighted,’ she wrote when her husband was given the job. ‘I never thought the Committee would have the sense. I do feel rewarded for choosing London. The P-P household is now commodiously furnished with two chairs!’

  In the decades after the Second World War, the methodology of economic history which Power and Postan had pioneered – a scientifically rigorous yet humane approach, applying economic concepts to history and making comparisons across time and place – was hailed as groundbreaking, and Postan’s reputation soared. He held the senior chair in history at Cambridge until 1965, a long, illustrious career that culminated in his knighthood in 1980. Their friends from Mecklenburgh Square days – Hugh Dalton, Evan Durbin, Hugh Gaitskell – reached high-ranking positions within the Labour Party after the war, and Postan (then remarried, with two sons) lived at the centre of Britain’s intellectual life. In 1975, he compiled a collection of Power’s essays, published as Medieval Women. While this brought her work briefly back to public attention, she was hailed as a women’s historian and celebrated for her pioneering life rather than for her work; her interest in international questions and structural inequality in all its forms was left aside. Historians including Maxine Berg (author of an excellent biography, the first of Power to be published) and Natalie Zemon Davis have argued convincingly for her importance in the discipline of economic history, but a 2016 collection of essays subtitled ‘Revisiting Tawney and Postan’ portrays her in passing as a mutual love interest, rather than collaborator and teacher. Since 1980, R. H. Tawney’s blue plaque has adorned 21 Mecklenburgh Square; as yet, the house next door bears no memento of the decades Eileen Power worked there, sharing ideas as equals.

  *

  Hope Mirrlees spent the Second World War at Shamley Green in Surrey with her mother, aunt and various evacuees, including T. S. Eliot, by now a close family friend, who came to stay at weekends and wrote parts of Four Quartets there. By this point, Mirrlees’s own writing had stalled. After Jane Harrison’s death, friends had written kindly to Hope, praising her devotion and forbearance. Alys Pearsall Smith was blunter: ‘For me, it is a very very great loss, but for you it is overwhelming, & I don’t see how you are to bear it.’ Hope set about organising the funeral and subsequent memorial service at Newnham (at which she refused to speak: ‘I simply couldn’t talk about her in public’). Writing later to Jane’s former pupil Jessie Stewart, Hope lamented the obituaries she had read (‘so abominably patronising & inadequate’), and praised Jessie for her own more nuanced tribute to their shared mentor, written for the Cambridge Magazine:

  The words of hers that you quote, ‘What things go on inside people that one never knows!’ came as a very curious echo to my own thoughts. I had been thinking how curious it was that the greater intimacy is, the more it becomes a matter of the body & of the little things of the surface of life. One only talks about things like the soul to comparative strangers, as a sort of intellectual exercise, & with, perhaps, a nuance of showing off. I think whenever a thought had matured we communicated it to each other. But I knew nothing of the chemical processes, so to speak, of her mind. And whether she had any ‘intimations of immortality’ I cannot possibly say – I am inclined to think not.

  Jane Harrison’s archive at Newnham College tells the story of Hope’s failed attempt to write her biography, which consumed her energies for much of the rest of her life. Over thirty years, Hope corresponded sporadically with Jessie Stewart, with whom she at first intended to collaborate, Hope covering Harrison’s personal life and Jessie providing the intellectual background. But Hope repeatedly refused to show anyone what she’d done, and in 1943 another former Newnham student, Victoria de Bunsen, was shocked when Hope turned up at her house and announced she wished to ‘wash her hands’ of the project, admitting that she had written nothing at all. In 1959, Stewart took matters into her own hands, and published Jane Ellen Harrison: A Portrait from Letters, based largely on Harrison’s letters to Gilbert Murray. (Leonard Woolf had regretfully rejected the book for the Hogarth Press, considering its composition ‘all over the place’.) Hope was dismayed that Jessie had outlined Harrison’s disappointment at Francis Cornford’s marriage and hinted at an unrequited love: ‘I am horribly distressed that this has been published,’ she remonstrated. ‘Jane would simply have loathed it.’ Her own refusal to finish the project, she insisted, was due to a feeling that she ‘couldn’t do justice to the Life without writing about very intimate things which Jane wished forgotten’. Whether that meant Harrison’s feelings towards men, or their own relationship, remains unknown.

  In February 1928, two months before Jane died, Hope cancelled the contract for her next novel. An ample cushion of family money enabled her to stop writing completely, such that by the 1940s Anthony Powell could describe Hope as ‘unmarried, with Bloomsbury associations in early life, though now settled down to a less exacting intellectual condition of comfortable upper-middle-browdom’. A change in religion was also at the root of her silence. In 1929, Virginia Woolf reported rumours that Hope had ‘grown very fat’ and ‘become a Roman Catholic on the sly’: ‘It is strange to see beauty – she had something elegant & individual – go out, like a candle flame.’ The following year, Hope left Bloomsbury for Kensington, a move which marked her disappearance from the literary scene. In 1946, she turned down Leonard Woolf’s suggestion that Hogarth reissue Paris (though she did consent to its republication in the Virginia Woolf Quarterly of 1973, but only on condition that passages referring to the Holy Communion and the Virgin Mary, which she now considered blasphemous, should be erased). She had lost touch with Mirsky – who died in a Soviet labour camp in 1939 – and Remizov, who also expresse
d a desire to return to Russia after the war, to the dismay of other displaced writers, who saw this attitude as a betrayal. Following her mother’s death in 1948, she emigrated to South Africa; after fifteen years in the Cape of Good Hope, she returned to England in 1963 and lived, surrounded by pug dogs, in Oxford, until she died on 1 August 1978, aged ninety-one. In all this time, it appeared to much of the outside world that she had vanished. When the Hogarth Press decided to reprint Avvakum in 1963, they couldn’t trace her; nor could the BBC producers who broadcast Lud-in-the-Mist in February 1978, and who sheepishly admitted, when she contacted them, that they had assumed she was dead, or possibly fictional: the text was attributed to ‘an unknown author who wrote under the name of Hope Mirrlees’.

  In the 1960s and 1970s, Hope Mirrlees did complete two more collections of poetry – formal, mannered verse bearing little resemblance to Paris – and the first volume of a projected two-part biography of the seventeenth-century MP and antiquarian Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, which T. S. Eliot had supported her in writing. But this work, like her biography of Harrison, was never finished; nor was a proposed study of Mirrlees herself, by the academic Suzanne Henig, who visited Mirrlees towards the end of her life and promised to spearhead her literary renaissance. At first Mirrlees appeared eager to cooperate, but eventually communication faded out. There were no obituaries on her death. Recently, a popular resurgence – including Neil Gaiman’s staunch advocacy of Lud-in-the-Mist, and the publication of her collected poems with an extensive biographical introduction by Sandeep Parmar – has returned her to critical attention; perhaps Henig’s prophecy – that ‘Paris and Lud have earned you a very high place indeed in the history of literature in this century which is yet to be written’ – will prove true.

  Jane Harrison, meanwhile, has found fewer contemporary champions. Gilbert Murray astutely pointed out in 1953 that Harrison was a pioneer who ‘stimulated others to go past her’; the style of her books dated fast, and her discoveries came to be swallowed by subsequent, more ‘accurate’ research, enabled by her own work. But her thinking changed history: contemporary scholars have built on the bold approaches her imagination and determination opened up. Among them is the Cambridge don and fellow Newnhamite Mary Beard, who wrote a biography of Harrison in 2000, and in whose study hangs a portrait of Harrison looking ‘like a benign grandmother’. Harrison, writes Beard, remains ‘an originary and radical thinker, a permanent fixture in the history of scholarship. So crucial is she to our own understanding of why we think (about Greek culture and religion) as we do that it is hard to believe quite how dispensable she seemed in the decades that followed her death … The scorn for Harrison in the 1940s and 1950s, the faint praise that damned any interest in her as touching (but misplaced) loyalty, now seems little short of ludicrous.’

  *

  In July 1939, Dorothy L. Sayers joined the Authors’ Planning Committee of the Ministry of Information, to offer advice on how authors could best aid the war effort. An internal memo described her as ‘very difficult and loquacious’, and the employment was short-lived. Instead, like many writers, she turned to practical war work, volunteering as an air-raid warden, knitting socks for trawlermen, and adopting two porcupines from London Zoo to raise money for the army. Having not published a Lord Peter Wimsey book for two years, she refused to capitulate to the fans who wrote begging for detective stories to keep their minds off the war. ‘It has been borne in upon me,’ she wrote sternly to one well-wisher, ‘that people are getting rather too much of the detective story attitude to life – a sort of assumption that there is a nice, neat solution for every imaginable problem. I am now spending my time telling people that real difficulties, such as sin, death and the night-bomber, can’t be “solved” like crosswords!’ Nonetheless, she relented enough to produce a weekly column for the Spectator featuring extracts from the letters and diaries of the Wimsey family, in which Peter, Harriet and various familiar minor characters discussed their own wartime activities. At first these served as simple, light-hearted propaganda, in the spirit of ‘keep calm and carry on’ – characters offered helpful advice on how to drive in blackouts, the best practice in fire drills and the educational benefits of evacuation. But by January 1940, the editor put a stop to the series, alarmed at Sayers’s increasingly gloomy prognosis and her unwarranted interventions on the paper’s editorial line: her bitter criticism of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, her warning at the empty rhetoric of ‘enduring peace and lasting settlement’ (‘it’s far too like the “war to end war”,’ murmurs Harriet) and her condemnation of the press for its immoral propaganda and its corrupt dependence on advertisers.

  After Gaudy Night, Sayers published only one more detective novel, Busman’s Honeymoon (1937), which began life as a play she wrote and produced with her Somerville friend Muriel St Clare Byrne. Its great commercial success led to a commission to stage a play at the Canterbury Cathedral Festival the following year, and Sayers – delighted at the chance to work on something she considered more serious – poured her energies into The Zeal of Thy House, which tells the story of the rebuilding of the cathedral in the twelfth century after a fire. Her aptitude for the dramatic form, and her ability to treat religious subjects in a matter-of-fact style, won the attention of the BBC, who were eager to give her talents a popular platform. The Man Born to Be King – a twelve-part drama based on the life of Jesus, from birth to resurrection – was broadcast on Sunday evenings during 1941 and 1942; it caused fierce controversy among Christian groups for allowing a human actor to portray Christ, and for its colloquial language. But Sayers was not bothered by the accusations of heresy: she wanted to remain an artist, free to imagine and critique, not be confined to evangelism or official apologia. She insisted that the human drama and emotional complexity of the Gospels would be wasted if they were read only in a spirit of reverence; she wanted people to gain from her work ‘the idea that religion is interesting and exciting and practical, and not just a kind of dreary and sloppy emotion about something that has nothing to do with life’.

  From this point, she achieved a significant reputation as a maverick religious commentator, though she turned down a doctorate in divinity offered by the Archbishop of Canterbury, eager that her secular writing should not be contaminated by association with the Church. She remained exasperated by the ‘bleating public’ and their incessant demand for more Wimsey novels. ‘I wrote the Peter Wimsey books when I was young and had no money,’ she told one admirer. ‘I made some money, and then I stopped writing novels and began to write what I’ve always wanted to write.’ She began to use Wimsey when she needed him – he appeared in a tonic advertisement when she had to do repairs at Great James Street, and in another for Horlicks Malted Milk to raise money for the tour of The Zeal of Thy House in 1938. He would resurface at intervals just for fun, too: she would write to newspapers or correspondents to correct speculation about the exact contour of the Wimsey chin, to explain the origin of the family motto, to reveal a Wimsey cipher hidden in a Shakespeare play, or to regale readers with the story of a Wimsey ancestor who in the reign of Charles II ‘boldly undertook the defence of a pair of Norfolk witches and triumphantly secured their acquittal’. But the Second World War gave rise to a new passion which would occupy the rest of her writing life. On her way down to the shelter during an air raid, she grabbed a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and reading in the underground gloom was thrilled and astonished by his stories, finding in them incongruous humour and stunning emotional depth. She grew convinced that Dante’s charm had been buried beneath bad translations and misconceptions which deemed him irrelevant to twentieth-century life, when rather his work was ‘as public and universal as the Christian faith itself’. From 1944, she began to translate and annotate Dante’s work for Penguin Classics. The first volume of his Inferno, published in 1949, sold 50,000 copies in a few weeks. Sayers considered the project her greatest achievement.

  Sayers was always anxious not to be represented as ‘a detectiv
e novelist, who in middle age has “taken up” theology and translating Dante and so on as a sort of irresponsible freak’. She wanted to be seen as a professional, a scholar, not a ‘gatecrashing outsider’, and as such was swift to emphasise her academic training, the theological preoccupations of her early poetry collections and her university grounding in medieval literature and the Romance tradition. ‘Historically, the thing is the other way round,’ she insisted. ‘I began as a poet and scholar, wrote detective stories in order to make a living, and have now gone back, like a spring, to my original bent.’ If there’s a degree of pomposity here, it’s because she had been dismissed before: she had always taken her work absolutely seriously, but knew that women still had to work twice as hard as men to prove their worth.