Helen Waddell and Maude Clarke

As women’s university participation expanded rapidly in the first decade of the twentieth century, two best friends at the Queen’s University Belfast nursed scholarly ambitions. Helen Waddell, budding feminist literary critic, and Maude Clarke, future Irish historian, would become famous medievalists. Waddell’s progress was stymied by her stepmother’s insistence on family duty and by academic misogyny; Clarke’s father instead cleared her way. This joint biography intertwines the story of their friendship with their up-to-date education, their shifting research interests and the obstacles and opportunities that faced them as women seeking academic careers. It traces Waddell’s evolution into an independent scholar, creative writer and translator of medieval Latin, and Clarke’s career as an influential Oxford don, training a whole generation of high-achieving women academics. The volume also publishes the surviving chapters of Waddell’s ‘Women in the Drama before Shakespeare’ (1912-19), an example of early feminist literary criticism, and Clarke’s searching, self-reflective notes on historiography, written c. 1930.