Helen Waddell
Helen Jane Waddell (31 May 1889 – 5 March 1965) was an
Biography
Personal life
Waddell was born in
As the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and missionary, Helen Wadell's religious faith was profound, and she applied her skills in translating Latin theological writing and poetry with the devotion of a critical believer. The biography by Felicitas Corrigan lays great stress on the importance of Helen's faith in influencing the choices she made in her life, and the standards for how she chose to live.[1]
Education
Waddell was educated at
Career
In 1913, Helen Waddell published a book of translations of Chinese poetry, Lyrics from the Chinese, in England with
Waddell did not submit her thesis for the DPhil, but published her work in 1927 as
Waddell's other works range widely in subject matter. For example, she also wrote plays.[5] Her first play was The Spoiled Buddha, which was performed at the Opera House, Belfast, by the Ulster Literary Society. Her The Abbe Prevost was staged in 1935. Her historical novel Peter Abelard was published in 1933. It was critically well received and became a bestseller.[6]
She also wrote many articles for the Evening Standard, the Manchester Guardian and The Nation, and did lecturing and broadcasting.
Waddell held the role of assistant editor of The Nineteenth Century magazine during the Second World War. Among her circle of friends in London, where she was vice-president of the Irish Literary Society, were W. B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Rose Macaulay, Max Beerbohm and George William Russell. Her personal and professional friendship with Siegfried Sassoon apparently made the latter's wife suspicious.[7] Although she never married, she had close relationships with several older men, including her publisher, Otto Kyllmann of Constable.[8]
Waddell received honorary degrees from the universities of Columbia, Belfast, Durham and St. Andrews and won the Benson Medal of the Royal Society of Literature.[9]
Death
A serious debilitating neurological disease put an end to Helen Waddell's writing career in 1950. She died in London in 1965 and was buried in Magherally churchyard, County Down, Northern Ireland.
Representative works
Novels
- Peter Abelard (1933)
Plays
- The Spoiled Buddha (performed 1915; London: T. Fisher Unwin 1919)
- The Abbé Prévost (London: Constable 1933).
Other
- Lyrics from the Chinese (1913)
- The Wandering Scholars (1927)
- Medieval Latin Lyrics (1929)
- Beasts and Saints (1934)
- The Desert Fathers (1936)
- For Better Factory Laws (1937) Pamphlet
- Poetry in the Dark Ages (1947) "The eighth W. P. KerMemorial Lecture delivered in the University of Glasgow, 28th October, 1947" (lecture published by Jackson, Son & Company, Publishers to the university, 1948)
- Stories from Holy Writ (1949)
- More Latin Lyrics: From Virgil to Milton (posthumous, edited by Dame Felicitas Corrigan, 1976)
- Between Two Eternities (1993) (posthumous, edited by Dame Felicitas Corrigan.)
References
- ^ ISBN 0-575-03674-5.
- ^ a b c d e Charles Lock, 'Scholar of the Dark: Helen Waddell and the Middle Ages', Helen Waddell Reassessed: New Readings, ed. by Jennifer FitzGerald (Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 39-61.
- ^ Jennifer FitzGerald, Helen Waddell and Maude Clarke: Irishwomen, Friends and Scholars (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012).
- ^ https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/waddell/lyrics/lyrics.html
- ^ Roy Rosenstein, "Helen Waddell at Columbia: Maker of Medievalists", in: Cahier Calin: Makers of the Middle Ages. Essays in Honor of William Calin Archived 29 October 2013 at the Wayback Machine, ed. Richard Utz and Elizabeth Emery (Kalamazoo, MI: Studies in Medievalism, 2011), pp. 14-17.
- ^ Jennifer Fitzgerald, "'Truth's Martyr or Love's Martyr': Helen Waddell's Peter Abelard" in the Colby Quarterly, vol. 36, 2 June 2000, pp. 176-7.
- ^ Max Egremont, Siegfried Sassoon: a Biography, Picador, 2005, p. 445
- ^ Hugh Oram (17 June 2014). "An Irishman's Diary on medievalist and writer Helen Waddell". Irish Times. Retrieved 31 May 2019.
- ^ Helen Waddell biography Archived 3 March 2007 at the Wayback Machine in the Dictionary of Ulster Biography
Further reading
- Blackett, Monica (1973). The Mark of the Maker: A Portrait of Helen Waddell. Constable.
External links
- Helen Waddell at the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [1]
- Short biography and "blue plaque" at the Ulster History Circle (archived 2011-06-05)
- Famous Faces from Belfast at Belfast Safaris – short biographies of Waddell and others (archived 2006-10-11)
- Works by or about Helen Waddell at Internet Archive
- Works by Helen Waddell at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Helen Waddell: Poems at Black Cat Poems
- Helen Waddell entry in the Banbridge District Online by Banbridge District Council
- Helen Waddell papers at the Genesis Project in the UK
- "Archival material relating to Helen Waddell". UK National Archives.
- Helen Waddell Papers at Queen's University Belfast
- Helen Waddell at Library of Congress, with 62 library catalogue records