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Abstract
Caroline Playne (1857–1948) was a committed and influential pacifist and internationalist who published four idiosyncratic histories of the First World War in which she diagnosed the bellicosity of the peoples of Europe as a shared mental illness. Espousing many deeply conservative opinions, she frequently responded to modern society with heightened moral outrage. However, Playne was privately wholly absorbed in the charitable support of London's enemy aliens, including unmarried mothers and illegitimate children. Archival evidence of this work, along with much of the rest of her campaigning life, survives in fragments, but is suppressed from her published works and her papers. This article seeks to explore the motivations of what emerges as a sustained act of biographical erasure. The image ultimately presented is of a woman who secured a voice through the suppression not only of her sex, but also her limitless human compassion, and so arguably her very self.
ORCiD
Richard Espley http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0547-5454
Notes on Contributor
Richard Espley completed his PhD, on the writer Djuna Barnes, at the University of Birmingham in 2005. He has worked professionally in libraries for some years and is currently Head of Modern Collections at Senate House Library, University of London.
Notes
1 S. Oldfield, ‘Playne, Caroline Elizabeth (1857-1948)’, in L. Goldman (ed.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn). <http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/view/article/38530>[accessed 10 August 2016].
2 See, for example, S. Oldfield, Women Against the Iron Fist: Alternatives to Militarism 1900–1989 (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989); A. Wiltsher, Most Dangerous Women: Feminist Peace Campaigners of the Great War (London: Pandora, 1985); J. Vellacott, Pacifists, Patriots and the Vote: The Erosion of Democratic Suffragism in Britain during the First World War (London: Palgrave, 2007).
3 See, for example, S. Tiernan, The Political Writings of Eva Gore-Booth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); for the use of Playne's work as primary evidence see, among others, A. Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
4 B.C. Boulter, ‘Obituary: Miss C. E. Playne’, Hampstead and Highgate Express, 6 February 1948, 4.
5 C.E. Playne, The Neuroses of the Nations (London: Allen and Unwin, 1925); C.E. Playne, The Pre-War Mind in Britain: An Historical Review (London: Allen and Unwin, 1928); C.E. Playne, Society at War: 1914-1916 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1931); C.E. Playne, Britain Holds On: 1917, 1918 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1933); C.E. Playne, Bertha von Suttner and the Struggle to Avert the World War (London: Allen and Unwin, 1936).
6 University of London Archive, Senate House Library, UoL/UL/4/18/54.
7 Caroline Playne Archive (afterwards CPA), Senate House Library, University of London, MS1112/91.
8 CPA, MS1112/134.
9 CPA, MS1112/111.
10 M. Culley, A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women from 1764 to the Present (New York: Feminist Press, 1985), 4.
11 R. Hogan, ‘Engendered Autobiographies: The Diary as a Feminine Form’, Prose Studies, 14 (1991), 97–100.
12 CPA, MS1112/6.
13 CPA, MS1112/6, 2 August 1916.
14 C. E. Playne, ‘Preface’, in F. E. Lockwood (ed.), Private Diary Part 11: Before the War (Eastbourne: [Gazette and Herald], [c. 1921]). On public and private spaces in wartime London, see E. Cronier, ‘The Street’, in Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert (eds.), Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919, vol. II: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 57–107 and C. Rollet, ‘The Home and Family Life’, in ibid., 315–53.
15 For an overview of the Committee's activities, see R. Fry, A Quaker Adventure: the Story of Nine Years’ Relief and Reconstruction (London: Nisbet, 1926).
16 Emergency Committee Executive Committee minutes, Library of the Society of Friends, YM/MfS/ FEWVRC/COMM/EME, vol. 1.
17 Ibid., vol. 3.
18 Ibid., vol. 3, 18 September 1917.
19 L. G. Robinson, Review of The Neuroses of the Nations by C. E. Playne, Economica, 16 (1926), 99.
20 Playne, Neuroses of the Nations, 18–19.
21 Playne, Britain Holds On, 106, 68.
22 C. Playne, The Romance of a Lonely Woman (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1904), 45.
23 Playne, Society at War, 103.
24 Playne, Pre-War Mind, 64.
25 J. Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’, Theory, Culture & Society, 2 (1985), 37.
26 Ibid., 41.
27 H. Blodgett, Centuries of Female Days: Englishwomen's Private Diaries (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 239.
28 For the wider experience of women in wartime London, see also S. R. Grayzel, ‘Men and Women at Home’, in J. Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War, Vol. III: Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 96–120.
29 CPA, MS1112/43.
30 Playne, Society at War, 338, 238.
31 Playne, Society at War, 238.
32 For Smith-Dorrien's moral campaigns, see A. J. Smither, The Man Who Disobeyed: Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien and his Enemies (London: Leo Cooper, 1970).
33 J. White, Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War (London: Bodley Head, 2014), 50, 49.
34 All of this activity is recorded in the Court Diary and social pages of The Times.
35 Emergency Committee Executive Committee minutes, Vol. 4, 9 April 1918.
36 Hansard, HC Deb, 27 April 1915, vol. 71, cc. 566–8.
37 International Congress of Women, International Congress of Women: Report/Bericht/Rapport (Amsterdam: International Congress of Women, [c. 1917]), 206.
38 Playne, Pre-War Mind, 288.
39 Playne, Pre-War Mind, 292, 296.
40 B. Green, ‘From Visible Flâneuse to Spectacular Suffragette? The Prison, the Street, and the Sites of Suffrage’, Discourse, 17 (1994–5), 69.
41 Playne, Society at War, 136.
42 V. Woolf, A Room of One's Own (London: Hogarth, 1929), 111.
43 CPA, MS1112/111.
44 Woolf, A Room, 111.