Waddell, Helen (1889–1965)

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Waddell, Helen (1889–1965)

Irish scholar of medieval literature and poet . Born Helen Jane Waddell in Tokyo, Japan, on May 31, 1889; died in London, England, on March 5, 1965; youngest child of Hugh Waddell and Jane Martin Waddell; educated at Victoria School for Girls, Queen's University, Belfast, and at Somerville College, Oxford; never married; no children.

Awards:

A.C. Benson Foundation Medal, Royal Society of Literature (1928); fellowship of Royal Society of Literature (1928); member of the Royal Irish Academy (1932); Hon. D.Litt, University of Durham (1932), Columbia University, New York (1935), University of St. Andrew's (1936).

Selected writings:

The Wandering Scholars (Constable, 1927); Medieval Latin Lyrics (Constable, 1929); Abelard (Constable, 1933); The Desert Fathers (Constable, 1936); Poetry in the Dark Ages (Constable, 1948).

Helen Waddell was born in Tokyo in 1889 to a Presbyterian missionary family. Her mother died when she was two, and her father subsequently married his cousin Martha Waddell , with whom Helen had a difficult relationship. She was educated at the Victoria School for Girls in Belfast, one of the best secondary schools in Ireland. Head-mistress Margaret Byers was so impressed with Helen's abilities that she offered to educate the girl for nothing, but Helen won enough scholarships and prizes to see her through. In 1908, Waddell went to Queen's University, Belfast, from which she graduated in 1911 with a first class B.A. in English language and literature. The following year, she was awarded a master's degree for research on Milton.

The visiting professor in English at Queen's was George Saintsbury, from Edinburgh University, whom Waddell admired greatly; he in turn respected her gifts as a scholar. They would remain in close contact until Saintsbury's death. She also developed a close friendship with the Reverend George Taylor and his wife, who were Presbyterian missionaries, and they wrote each other weekly letters until his death in 1920. These friendships helped her through a stifling and unhappy home life. Her studies at Queen's were often curtailed by her obligation to look after her stepmother, an invalid who disapproved of novels and thought that plays were the devil's work. In 1915, Waddell's brother George, a Presbyterian minister, died suddenly, and his passing deeply affected Helen. She became even closer to her sister Margaret at Kilmacrew in County Down, and Margaret's children were the initial audience for the Bible stories which Helen contributed to the Presbyterian magazine Daybreak.

Waddell decided to forego further postgraduate study in order to look after her invalid stepmother. In a letter to her sister in 1935, she wrote candidly: "I didn't actually hate mother but I had a deep festering grudge against all the ways she had thwarted me, the things she had taken from me, and never a word of thanks…. I knew that if only I had mastered that grudge inwardly as well as outwardly, those years would have been far richer." When her stepmother finally died in February 1919, Waddell suffered a nervous reaction after "the long years," as she termed them. In November 1920, she arrived at Somerville College in Oxford to study for a doctorate. Her academic career soon prospered, and the following year she was appointed to a lectureship under the Cassell Trust Fund.

However, Waddell never settled in Oxford, though she made many friends there. She found the all-female atmosphere suffocating, and she disliked the constrictions of academic work. "I am horribly afraid that artists and journalists are more my sort than academic people," she told George Saintsbury. Waddell moved to London to find freelance work and earned money by marking school and university exams. "I've never felt so alive," she wrote. "I feel as if those two years in Oxford were a bad dream." She refused offers from a number of the women's colleges to return to Oxford. However, she did accept the Susette Taylor Travelling Scholarship from Lady Margaret Hall which enabled her to go to Paris to do research for what became The Wandering Scholars. When Waddell returned to London in 1925, she started writing that book, and became friends with Otto Kyllmann of Constable, the company that would publish nearly all her work.

The Wandering Scholars was released in 1927 to considerable acclaim. Waddell followed this in 1929 with Medieval Latin Lyrics. In 1931, she published A Book of Medieval Latin for schools which went into 10 editions over the next 30 years. She enjoyed literary and artistic life in London, and her literary friends included W.B. Yeats, Æ (George Russell), Stephen Gwynn, Virginia Woolf, Enid Starkie , Gustav Holst, and Paul Henry. Waddell maintained her links with Ireland and with Irish friends and regularly visited her sister's home at Kilmacrew, "the kindest house I know and the most human" she once said. It was Æ who urged her to write about the French medieval theologian Peter Abelard. (See Heloise.) She immersed herself in the study of Abelard's theology but progress on the book was slow: "I felt for so long that onCE Abelard was written the thing for which I was born would be done." When Abelard was published in 1933, it went through three editions in six months and was translated into nine languages.

Shortly after the publication of Abelard, Waddell bought a large house at Primrose Hill in London which was to prove something of a burden to her in later years. In 1935, a play she had written in the early 1930s, The Abbé Prévost, was produced in London but was not a success. She never attempted another drama, although she often considered adapting Abelard for the stage. Waddell then returned to medieval scholarship, and in April 1936 her book The Desert Fathers was published to much praise; her introduction was hailed as a piece of superlative prose.

Waddell stayed in London throughout the war. She became the assistant to F.A. Voigt, editor of the journal Nineteenth Century which was published by Constable. This caused her considerable frustration because of the time it took away from her writing, although she did publish a number of poems. The noise and disruption caused by air raids also caused increasing strain, which was not helped by the placement of anti-aircraft guns near her house. She kept open house for various nieces and nephews who were passing through London, but was devastated when two of her sister's sons died in accidents in 1941 and 1942. In the last months of the war, her house suffered considerable damage in two air raids, and by the end of the war she was near to physical and mental exhaustion.

Waddell rallied after the armistice. Her Ker lecture at the University of Glasgow in 1947 on "Latin Poetry in the Dark Ages" was a great success, and she developed a warm friendship with the poet Siegfried Sassoon. But her health began to deteriorate once more, and she told Sassoon, "I have been like something lost in a fog for most of the year." Kyllmann encouraged her to write, but she never completed her book on John of Salisbury, one of Abelard's students. Waddell, who realized that her mental faculties were failing, consulted specialists about her worsening memory losses but nothing could be done. She was nursed in her last years by her housekeeper and friend, Mrs. Luff. When Waddell died in March 1965, she was buried in the churchyard near Kilmacrew. Sassoon once praised her "unique quality of integrity and illuminativeness…. The eclipse of her magnificent intelligence was a disaster to me."