Helen Waddell and Maude Clarke

As womens university participation expanded rapidly in the first decade of the twentieth century, two close friends at Queens University Belfast nursed scholarly ambitions. Helen Waddell, budding feminist literary critic, and Maude Clarke, future Irish historian, were to become famous medievalists. Waddells progress was stymied by her stepmothers insistence on family duty and by academic misogyny; Clarkes father, in contrast, helped to clear her way. This joint biography intertwines the story of their friendship with their modern education, their shifting research interests and the obstacles and opportunities that faced them as women seeking academic careers. It traces Waddells evolution into an independent scholar, creative writer and translator of medieval Latin, and Clarkes career as an influential Oxford don, training a generation of high-achieving women academics. The book also reproduces the surviving chapters of Helen Waddells Woman in the Drama before Shakespeare (1912-1919), an example of early feminist literary criticism, and Maude Clarkes searching, self-reflective Historiographical Notes (c.1930).