Helen Jane Waddell

Artist Info

Helen Jane WaddellTokyo, 1889 - 1965, London

Waddell, Helen Jane (1889–1965), writer and translator, was born on 31 May 1889 at 25 Nakano-Cho, Azabu, Tokyo, the youngest child in the family of eight sons and two daughters of the Revd Hugh Waddell (1840–1901) and his wife, Jane Martin (1850–1892), of Banbridge, co. Down. Helen's father was a missionary, and both parents inherited a long tradition of service to the United Presbyterian church in Scotland. Jane Waddell became ill, and after returning with her children to Belfast in 1892, died in that year when Helen was two. Hugh married his cousin Martha Waddell in the following year, and took the family back to Japan in 1896. Ill health caused him to return with them in 1900 to Ulster, where he died in 1901.

Helen Waddell was educated at Victoria College (1900–07), and after a year of private study, at Queen's University, Belfast, where under Professor Gregory Smith she graduated BA with first-class honours in English in 1911, and MA by thesis (‘John Milton the epicurist’) in 1912. Her dissertation was examined by George E. B. Saintsbury, who remained an inspiring friend and courtly correspondent until his death in 1933. Though she found her stepmother uncongenial, she dutifully stayed with her in Ulster until Martha's death in 1920. During these years she published Lyrics from the Chinese (reprinted seven times between 1913 and 1938) and devotional Bible stories later collected in Stories from Holy Writ (1949), as well as articles and reviews. She also wrote a play, The Spoiled Buddha (published 1919), which was performed in 1915 in Belfast with her brother Samuel (who became well known in Dublin as actor and playwright) in the chief role. During this period she became an ardent home ruler, bitterly critical of the politics of Sir Edward Carson.

Helen Waddell was thirty-one when in 1920 she went up to Somerville College, Oxford, registering for a research degree but never submitting her dissertation. There she renewed contact with her childhood friend Maude Clarke, and was befriended by the Homeric archaeologist Helen Lorimer. At the invitation of St Hilda's Hall she delivered a successful course of lectures on medieval mime, but her first acquaintance with the Carmina burana determined the course of her life's work on medieval Latin lyric and medieval humanism. After five terms at Oxford she moved without reluctance in June 1922 to London. After failing to secure various university posts and turning down the headship of Victoria College, she taught for a year at Bedford College, London, in 1922–3.

The influence of Saintsbury helped Waddell to win the award of a Susette Taylor travelling scholarship from Lady Margaret Hall, which allowed her two years' study in Paris in 1923–4. There she perfected her French, learned some German, and above all attained familiarity with the most important poetry of the fourth to the twelfth centuries. Enid Starkie became a friend at this time. Waddell returned to London in December 1924, and in 1926 delivered a course of lectures at Lady Margaret Hall entitled ‘The wandering scholars’ to crowded audiences; she had complemented her wide reading in Paris with further study at the British Museum, by which time she had read through the entire 217 volumes of the Patrologia Latina.

In the years following her return Waddell published a stream of works which took the academic and literary worlds by storm. The Wandering Scholars (1927), which was reprinted three times within a year and for which she was awarded the A. C. Benson silver medal by the Royal Society of Literature, remains an indispensable introduction for students embarking on medieval Latin studies. This published research provided a historical frame for her creative translations in Medieval Latin Lyrics (1929). These two classic works demonstrate a combination of qualities which explain the fascination which she exercised over a wide public: the phenomenal breadth of her reading, the vivid historical imagination with which she brings an Ausonius or Alcuin or Abelard to life, and the compelling command over language evident in both her poetic translations and her descriptive prose. She was never an exact Latin scholar (G. G. Coulton was an inveterate and carping critic who seems to have blocked her election as fellow of the British Academy), but she converted this limitation into an advantage. Though often failing to reproduce exactly what was said, she created original poems which none the less uncannily mirror the moods of the originals. In an unpublished paper on translation, she emphasizes the basic truth that ‘the plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower’; with Fitzgerald, she believed ‘better a live sparrow than a stuffed eagle’.

Perhaps Waddell's greatest creative achievement was her novel Peter Abelard (1933), which was reprinted fifteen times within a year, and has been translated into nine languages, an authentic evocation of the worlds of twelfth-century Paris and Brittany. This was followed by The Desert Fathers (1936), a translation of selections from Rosweyd's celebrated edition of Vitae patrum (1615), to which she prefaced a characteristically perceptive and enthusiastic introduction. Earlier, despite the demands of her editorial job at Constables which she accepted after publication of The Wandering Scholars, she found time to edit A Book of Medieval Latin for Schools (1931, frequently reprinted). In that same year she edited Cole's My Journey to Paris in the Year 1765, translated Manon Lescaut, and wrote a play about its author, The Abbé Prévost. In 1934 she collected and published translated stories from the Latin called Beasts and Saints.

During the thirties Waddell was overwhelmed with demands to lecture to learned societies. She received honorary degrees from Durham (1932), Belfast (1934), Columbia (1935), and St Andrews (1936). She was made a member of the Royal Irish Academy (1932) and a corresponding fellow of the Medieval Academy of America (1937). Through her books and her engaging personality she gained the friendship of such disparate literary figures as George William Russell (AE), Max Beerbohm, Charles Morgan, George Bernard Shaw, and Siegfried Sassoon. She breakfasted with Stanley Baldwin and corresponded regularly with him. She lunched with Queen Mary and later (during the Second World War) with General de Gaulle, who had asked her to translate his speech delivered at Tunis in June 1943 to galvanize the Americans to decisive action.

After the appearance of Peter Abelard, Waddell planned to write a sequel in two further books, but this and her life's ambition to publish a study of John of Salisbury were thwarted by the onset of the Second World War. Her duties at Constables, where she now assumed the assistant editorship of the Nineteenth Century under F. A. Voigt, her passionate and time-devouring patriotism, and the domestic distractions of a large house in Primrose Hill Road, where her ageing publisher became a permanent resident (her tendency to conduct platonic love affairs with older men like Gregory Smith and George Saintsbury extended to Otto Kyllmann), left her little leisure for sustained writing. The occasional translations which she essayed have been gathered by Dame Felicitas Corrigan in More Latin Lyrics from Virgil to Milton.

These pressures, accentuated by a near escape from a German ‘doodle-bug’ in 1944 and by further bomb damage to her house in the following year, took a heavy toll of Waddell's nervous energy, and she began to suffer from intermittent amnesia.

An invitation from the University of Glasgow to deliver the W. P. Ker lecture stimulated her to resume her intellectual activities, but this was to be Waddell's last sustained contribution. Published as Poetry in the Dark Ages (1948), it retraverses the areas of The Wandering Scholars which might best have inspired post-war Britain seeking to build the new Troy. By the early 1950s she was increasingly gripped by mental paralysis, and for some years before her death she was oblivious to her surroundings. She died at the Whittington Hospital, in Highgate, London, on 5 March 1965, and was buried at Magherally, co. Down. She had never married.

P. G. Walsh

Sources

F. Corrigan, Helen Waddell: a biography (1986) · M. Blackett, The mark of the maker: a portrait of Helen Waddell (1973) · C. Nesbitt, A little love and good company (1975) · F. Corrigan, More Latin lyrics from Virgil to Milton (1976) · private information (2004) [family] · CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1965)