Following in the footsteps of H.G. Wells, Elizabeth Von Arnim, Arnold Bennett, Ada Leverson, May Sinclair and others, in 1915 the young Helen Waddell and Maude Clarke (later well-known medievalists) collaborated on a marriage-problem novel, Discipline, published here for the first time. Modeled on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, the action centres on Elizabeth St. John's grievances against her husband, in her eyes justifying a series of rebellions which, however, rebound upon herself. Equally important is her friendship with Anne Delahide, sparkling with the fun of being intellectual. Like other marriage-problem novels, 'Discipline' sows seeds of feminist doubt even as the romantic comedy returns the heroine to the marital embrace.However, the friendship between Elizabeth and Anne allows the authors to hint at a homosocial alternative. The Introduction by Jennifer FitzGerald teases out the subtext, the struggles of a young university-educated and independent-minded wife to forge the stable self-defined identity her husband can take for granted. It examines the parallels and contrasts with Waddell's 1916 biographical essay, also published here, on the 18th-century Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, which also follows the trajectory of romantic comedy but ends in the humdrum, unrelenting heartbreak of an irreconcilable marriage. Both texts are comprehensively annotated.
About the Author: Helen Waddell, celebrated medievalist, was born in Japan in 1889, the youngest child of an Irish Presbyterian missionary. Returning to Belfast at the age of eleven, she graduated from the Queen's University of Belfast in 1911. Her ambitions for an academic career were stymied by duty to her stepmother. In 1927 she published The Wandering Scholars on the humanism of the Latin Middle Ages, followed by translations: Mediaeval Latin Lyrics, Beasts and Saints, and The Desert Fathers, and by her best-selling historical novel, Peter Abelard (1933). She died in London in 1965. Maude Clarke was born in 1892 in Belfast, the daughter of a Church of Ireland clergyman. She became a close friend of Waddell's while a History student at Queen's. After a second degree at Oxford, she returned to substitute for the Queen's Professor of History during World War I. From 1919 she was History Tutor at Somerville College, Oxford. Her promise to become one of the leading medieval historians of her generation was cut short by breast cancer. She completed Medieval Representation and Consent just before her death in 1935, while her earlier papers were collected posthumously in Fourteenth Century Studies (1937). Jennifer FitzGerald taught in the School of English at Queen's University Belfast from 1975 to 2002. She has published biographical and critical studies of Helen Waddell and Maude Clarke, including essays on each in Women Medievalists and the Academy, ed. Jane Chance (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005) and a dual biography, Helen Waddell and Maude Clarke: Irishwomen, Friends and Scholars (Peter Lang, 2012). She edited Helen Waddell Reassessed: New Readings (Peter Lang, 2014).