Among the Newnham College archives - Placement blog post
By Saskia Barnard, CHASE funded doctoral researcher at Birkbeck, University of London
In 1871, a group of academics, activists, and writers engaged in organising ‘Lectures for Ladies’ in Cambridge decided to found an institution for women’s higher education. The idea was to provide accommodation as well as teaching, and what began as a house on Regent Street (which could accommodate just five students) soon became Newnham Hall—now Newnham College—which opened its doors in 1875. One of the first students to join Newnham was Jane Ellen Harrison, who enrolled to study Classics. Harrison would go on to become, in Mary Beard’s words, ‘the first woman in England to become an academic, in the fully professional sense—an ambitious, full-time, salaried, university researcher and lecturer.’ Among her most admired works are Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903), and Themis: A Study of the Origins of Greek Religion (1912). Following her death in 1928, Harrison’s personal papers were returned to Newnham College, where I worked for six months part-time between January and December 2022. But it wasn’t Harrison who first drew me to the college’s archives.
In 1910, a precocious young woman enrolled to study Classics under the supervision of Harrison at Newnham; her name was Hope Mirrlees. A talented linguist, Mirrlees would go on to develop an intimate relationship with Harrison, despite the forty years between them. From the mid 1910s, they travelled to and from Europe together, and eventually settled in Paris, where they collaborated on a translation of Russian folktales, The Book of the Bear (1926). In the late 1920s, the pair returned to London, where Mirrlees nursed Harrison until her death. Today, Mirrlees is best known for her modernist work, Paris: A Poem (1920), which was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, and her last (of three) novels, Lud-in-the-Mist (1926).
In October 2021, as I was preparing to teach an undergraduate class on Mirrlees’s Paris, I learned that no draft manuscripts for the poem survive. I did, however, know that Mirrlees’s archive was housed in Newnham, so I got in touch with the college archivist, Frieda Midgley, to arrange an initial visit. After an afternoon spent among Mirrlees’s papers (think vintage photographs, intimate letters, near-illegible handwriting), I began to draft a proposal for a CHASE placement. I didn’t have much of a plan beyond the desire to spend more time in the archive, which showed a different (and lesser-known) side to the glamorous cosmopolitan author of Paris.
The Newnham College archives hold drafts of all the works which Mirrlees began (and mostly didn’t finish) after Paris, including three biographies (one of Harrison), and a series of notebooks which document her shifting intellectual and literary interests following her conversion to Catholicism. The time spent working among these papers was one of the highlights of my doctoral study. My placement at Newnham gave me extensive experience of working with different forms of archival material, and I learned so much from it: not only about Mirrlees (which was, of course, the intention), but also about myself as a researcher. More specifically, it gave me the time and space to explore what it means to keep company with a writer through their handwritten notes, drafts, and letters, and how to work with the feelings of familiarity, ambivalence, and embarrassment which arise form this peculiar form of proximity to another life. These and other such questions raised by my placement work have now found a wider resonance within the context of my PhD.
My placement was split between researching in the archive and writing away from it. I worked up drafts for three pieces of writing on Mirrlees—two academic articles, and a photo-essay—which I plan to revise and publish after I’ve submitted my PhD in June. I am so grateful to Steve Coburn at CHASE, and to Frieda Midgley at Newnham, for supporting and organising my placement, and I would like to thank Frieda especially for her time, conversation, and help in navigating the collections. I would highly recommend CHASE students to apply for a placement if they develop another area of interest during their PhD.