Square Haunting

by Francesca Wade

  At Girton, Power was introduced to her first mentors, who raised her consciousness of the political struggle faced by women outside of the college’s closeted, supportive community. She was taught by the formidable Ellen McArthur, a pioneering economic historian and committed suffragist. And McArthur’s example was supplemented by the encouragement of Alys Pearsall Smith, who was then wife of Bertrand Russell, a close friend of Jane Harrison and the aunt of Power’s university friend Karin Costelloe, with whom Eileen spent several summer vacations. Alys swept Eileen along to her first suffrage meeting, alarming her by thrusting her on to the platform. Sensing a potential protégée, she then enlisted Eileen in campaigning alongside her nieces (Karin and Ray, who as Ray Strachey would go on to write the celebrated history of the women’s movement, The Cause). Power was entranced by life at Alys’s home, Court Place in Iffley, which was only a few miles from her aunts’ austere house on Oxford’s Woodstock Road, yet represented a completely different world. It showed her a casually luxurious life of parties, motor car expeditions, open discussion of marriage, philosophy and politics, and an implicit conviction that one’s own activities, public and private, could have a real bearing on society. The daring conversation stunned Eileen to silence: ‘I feel stupid,’ she told Margery, ‘because I’ve been associating with such brilliant people.’ There, she met Hope Mirrlees, another great friend of Karin’s, who impressed Eileen with her effortless sophistication and her ability to pull off ‘an elopement or two & several disappearances’ during an evening dance, even under the watchful eye of several elderly chaperones. ‘I’m quite in love with the Mirrlees girl,’ wrote an awestruck Eileen to Margery.

  She appears not to have kept in touch with Hope, but was thrilled when Alys announced that she was determined to ‘push’ her, ‘in order to try & save me from the fate of high school teaching’. Much like Dorothy L. Sayers at the same age, Power felt wary of ‘stumbling along the dull path of dondom’, but was unsure what route to pursue instead; nonetheless, thanks to Alys, her sense of righteous indignation at women’s position was now ignited. Back at Girton, she became an officer of the college branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, and spoke twice at meetings alongside Millicent Garrett Fawcett. She began to expound at length in letters about the ‘monstrous’ social system ‘which divides the world into male men and female women and cannot conceive of the existence of human persons’; she entered fierce arguments with her uncles, ‘exasperating them by ultra radical motions, just as they are descanting upon the merits of tariff reform and the House of Lords’, and broke into furious French in a pub, attacking a Frenchman who had ‘asserted that woman’s object in life was to be a wife and mother’ while man’s province was ‘reason, brain, intellect’. ‘I don’t think I have ever been so angry,’ Power told Margery. Yet triumph was hers: ‘I tore him into tiny little bits and scattered them on the floor and danced on them.’

  Power’s own determination to trespass into the ‘male province’ was never in doubt. After leaving Girton in 1910, she took up a scholarship at the Sorbonne in Paris (‘living la vie Boheme in an atmosphere of much cigarette smoke, conversation and respectability’). There, she wrote a thesis on Queen Isabella of France, the wife of Edward II and ‘the most disreputable woman of her day’, whose life, as Power saw it, was ‘a perfect hotchpotch of lovers and murders & plots’. Power enjoyed her time in Paris, where she spent days soaking up medieval art in the Louvre and the Cluny, and wrote in anguish to Margery about the poverty of her French teacher, a single mother who lived among ‘feminists, radicals and poets’ and supported herself by sewing: ‘Imagine, Margie, that brilliantly intellectual little thing tied down to slaving all day with her needle (which she loathes) for a wretched little pittance.’ Though it was a stimulating experience, she decided not to stay on in Paris for a doctorate – but in the summer of 1911 an enticing new opportunity arose. As was the case for Jane Harrison, it was a woman-led initiative that gave Power her break as a historian. Power was invited to join the London School of Economics as a Shaw Research Student, on a generous fellowship established in 1904 by Charlotte Payne Townshend Shaw, a prominent feminist and the wife of George Bernard Shaw. When her scholarship was awarded to a man for the fifth consecutive year, Charlotte stipulated that it should henceforth be reserved for women only, and given specifically to support research into women’s lives, in the hope that the monographs produced by fellows would form a much-needed canon of women’s history.

  It was an exciting time and place for Power to launch her research career. Since its foundation by the Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw and Graham Wallas, the London School of Economics had stood at the centre of London’s left-wing activities. In 1894, a lawyer and Fabian Society donor named Henry Hunt Hutchinson had committed suicide and appointed Sidney Webb his executor, specifying that a legacy of £20,000 was to go towards advancing the socialist cause, which the Fabians considered the only viable response to pervasive inequality in Britain. To this end, the Webbs decided to found a school in London, inspired by Paris’s École Libre des Sciences Politiques, where students of economics would be supported in their research by professors and activists wholly dedicated to social reform, with an emphasis on vocational training and on the application of economic theory to practical problems. Co-educational from its inception, by 1904 the LSE had over fourteen hundred students, many studying for the new degrees of B.Sc. (Econ) and D.Sc. (Econ), the country’s first university degrees devoted to the social sciences. Classes held in the day were repeated in the evenings for working students, many sent by railway companies, insurance offices and the civil service. In the narrow side streets between Kingsway and High Holborn, their tall buildings stained with London smog, the school bustled round the clock with learning and discussion. Nearby, the Webbs – Beatrice towering over Sidney – worked on their anti-Poor Law campaign from the Fabian Society office in Clement’s Inn Passage, while next door was the headquarters of the Women’s Social and Political Union, packed with determined women at work making placards, typing pamphlets and occasionally hiding from the police.

  At the LSE – though the idea was surely conceived during her time in a Cambridge women’s college – Eileen Power began her study of medieval nunneries, which would become her first full-length published book. In the early years of the twentieth century, the fight for equal suffrage had sparked a growing interest in women’s and working-class history. Frustrated at their political disenfran-chisement, women looked to the past for models and alternatives, eager to establish a historical framework from which to agitate for change. Many turned to historians such as Jane Harrison, whose work offered fertile proof that women’s subordination was carefully constructed over time, and not based on any ‘natural’ order. Power and her friends – among them the historians Alice Clark, Vera Anstey and Ivy Pinchbeck – pored eagerly over Olive Schreiner’s new book, Woman and Labour, which argued that capitalism had systematically eroded women’s productive labour and thus their independence (and which, wrote Vera Brittain twenty years later, ‘sounded to the world of 1911 as insistent and inspiring as a trumpet-call summoning the faithful to a vital crusade’). When Power returned to Girton in 1913, to take up a position as director of studies, she began making notes for short biographical studies of medieval women, a project which would occupy her sporadically across her career.

  Power’s imagination was not captured by the idealised ladies of chivalric romances, nor the writings of the Church or the aristocracy, which could afford to ‘regard its women as an ornamental asset’. Instead, she scoured records of daily life for traces of independent, working women, and found a ‘practical equality’ prevailing among the villeins and cotters who administered their own holdings, the enterprising widows who traded as ‘femes soles’, and the poor women who worked in fields and at benches to support their families, then went to church on Sunday, where ‘preachers told them in one breath that woman was the gate of
hell and that Mary was Queen of heaven’. ‘Certainly,’ she wrote, ‘the middle ages would not have understood the Victorian relegation of women to the purely domestic job of running the home.’ It was the stories of these women that Power wanted to uncover – the duties and preoccupations of their everyday lives, their relations with their husbands and children and the world around them – as she began to make her own way as an independent woman in a world run by men.

  But Power’s interest was not just personal: it was piqued, like Harrison’s, by a strong desire to change the common conception of history as ‘the biographies of great men’, and to shatter the assumption that ‘to speak of ordinary people [was] beneath the dignity of history’. Power’s upbringing, though fractured, was middle-class, but she had been fascinated by both the aristocratic glamour of Court Place and the poverty she had seen in Paris, and had been struck by her ability to move freely between divergent worlds. In Paris, a longstanding railway strike had left her feeling ‘wildly socialistic and revolutionary’, furious that the division of society into ‘capitalists and workers’ stacked the balance of power so firmly against the poor. Now, spurred by the longer view she had developed at the LSE, she wanted to interrogate the class system that offered people such variable prospects from birth. Study of the medieval period had long been dominated by nationalists and constitutional experts, who wrote to explain and preserve prevailing systems of power, focusing on wars, dynasties and kings, and on records which indicated deeprooted national character. Instead, Power wanted a living history which probed ‘the obscure lives and activities of the great mass of humanity’ and took into account the things that affected them: the introduction of the turnip to England in 1645 – providing enough food to stoke the Industrial Revolution – rather than the beheading of Charles I four years later; the gradual evolution of a banking and credit system rather than the building of a single cathedral; the daily misery of war rather than the significance of territorial gains.

  And above all, she wanted to write in a way that would be accessible. During her years back at Girton she poured her research into her next book, Medieval People (1924), a revelation and a surprise bestseller (republished in paperback in 1937 as one of the first Pelican books, and advertised as ‘a classic of social history’). Populated with prioresses, pilgrims, clothworkers and wool traders, it was original in its focus on ordinary people whose lives were ‘if less spectacular, certainly not less interesting’ than those of the aristocrats, criminals or otherwise exceptional figures – predominantly men – whose voices have survived in the records. Addressed explicitly to the ‘general reader’, Power’s intimate style is novelistic, her focus not on manor houses but on ‘the kitchens of history’. Through nuanced speculation and vivid detail she fleshed out her subjects – to whom she refers as ‘our ancestors’ – into sympathetic, complex characters, sensitive to their mundane yet defining concerns: the practical pressures of rent, diet, childcare arrangements and travel expenses; the joy of songs or games. The book stands as her manifesto for what history can be: illuminating, personal, entertaining and political. Virginia Woolf knew Power’s work well, and it’s likely that she had its message in mind when she called, in A Room of One’s Own, for ‘Anon’ to be returned to her rightful place in history. ‘We still praise famous men,’ Power wrote, ‘for he would be a poor historian who could spare one of the great figures who have shed glory or romance upon the page of history; but we praise them with due recognition of the fact that not only great individuals, but people as a whole, unnamed and undistinguished masses of people, now sleeping in unknown graves, have also been concerned in the story.’

  *

  When Eileen Power joined the LSE as a student, she was scathing about its social life, finding the school full of ‘dew-dabblers, pretentious socialists & frothy Fabians & unconscionably earnest young people generally!’ But when she returned as a lecturer in the autumn of 1921, she joined a faculty full of radicals, whose company and collaboration would be integral to many of her future projects. In 1919, William Beveridge had taken over as director, and the LSE had undergone a swift expansion, transforming from a cramped and casual evening institution to a leading modern university at the forefront of developments in sociology. A generous yet egotistical character utterly devoted to his work, Beveridge quintupled the school’s annual income, securing lucrative grants from the government, the Rockefeller Foundation and the business world. His schemes for advancement were unpredictable, directed by his enthusiasms and sped on by his fundraising verve: at one point a rumour arose that cages of chimps were going to be installed at the school so that students could study their mating habits.

  In 1921, the university was a building site: classes took place in converted army huts approached by leapfrogging over puddles, while lecturers fought to be heard above the noise of drills. That year, the school enrolled almost three thousand students from more than thirty countries, while the Senior Common Room buzzed with discussion of the rapidly changing political climate. In the 1920s and 1930s, the LSE was the epicentre for what Beatrice Webb described as a ‘circle of rebellious spirits and idealist intellectuals’, many of whom invested their hopes for social reform in the fledgling Labour Party. Established in 1900 out of the trade union movement, the party briefly took power in 1924 as a minority government under Ramsay MacDonald, but collapsed after nine months and did not return to government until 1929, being ousted again in 1931. Through the interwar years, LSE economists and historians were hard at work establishing a democratic platform on which socialism could be brought to Britain, focused on confronting the practical issues of policy that hampered Labour during its stints in power over the decades; their programmes for an overhaul of the economic system would form the basis of the post-1945 Labour administration. Members of the economics department, including Lionel Robbins and Friedrich Hayek, regularly traded blows with Cambridge’s John Maynard Keynes over market reform, while Charles Webster – who lived at 38 Mecklenburgh Square – arrived straight from the Foreign Office to become Stevenson Chair of International History. The Polish-born anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski (who lived on Guilford Street) worked alongside the future prime minister Clement Attlee, who had begun his career as Beatrice Webb’s secretary. At the centre of most of the Common Room’s controversies was the Marxist political scientist Harold Laski, whose outspoken lectures led one Conservative MP to denounce the LSE publicly as a ‘hotbed of communist teaching’, forcing Beveridge to ban the school’s Marx Society from meeting on LSE premises and to placate business-world investors anxious about the ends to which their money was being put.

  But its staff’s intimate involvement in politics, both British and international, proved the LSE’s greatest strength. On Monday afternoons, staff and students would convene for ‘grand seminars’ where issues of the day were discussed without hierarchy and with a sense of urgent practical purpose. As soon as she arrived, Power was delighted by the intellectual stimulus of conversations in the Common Room, at clubs and cafes in Soho and Fitzrovia, during lively country weekends at Passfield Corner in Hampshire with the Webbs and their guests, or over long dinners in Mecklenburgh Square. Just as she had hoped, the LSE offered a way of life utterly different from the one she had led in Cambridge. While Girton had given Power a friendly community to which she always felt loyal, she had ‘often chafed at being cooped up’ there, and when she accepted the LSE job she admitted to Margery that she was ‘tired of community life’, which had begun to constrain her. Just like Jane Harrison, she was painfully aware that the women’s colleges (particularly Girton, which stood well outside the town centre) remained separate and subordinate within the wider university: she felt the same ambivalence Harriet Vane outlines in Gaudy Night, glad that the women dons can support each other in dedication to their work yet frustrated at their apparent unworldliness and lack of a public voice. Like Harrison, Power felt an overwhelming urge to strike out from Cambridge as her interests became more political and she b
egan to envisage a wider audience for her writing. And arriving in London gave her a taste of the freedom she wanted.

  At the LSE, women students and lecturers were not segregated, but worked alongside their male counterparts as equals; Power took her place in a modern, metropolitan university established on egalitarian principles, and joined a ready-made circle of progressive thinkers eager to include her in their plans. Power entered London social life with gusto, frequenting restaurants and jazz clubs, attending clandestine political confabulations in hotel basements and rallies in the parks. Her regular ‘kitchen dances’ at 20 Mecklenburgh Square were attended by economists, politicians and novelists, including Virginia Woolf, who recalled sharing a packet of chocolate creams there with the civil servant Humbert Wolfe. ‘I like people to be all different kinds,’ Power wrote to her friend Helen Cam in 1938, explaining why she had chosen not to apply for a job back in Cambridge; her letter gives a joyful snapshot of London life. ‘I like dining with H. G. Wells one night, & a friend from the Foreign Office another, and a publisher a third & a professor a fourth; and I like seeing all the people who pass through London and putting some of them up in my prophet’s chamber.’