‘This Spider Web of Woman's Life’: Private Space and Community Life in Peter Abelard

Abstract

This essay explores such complex and ambiguous presentation of convent life in Helen Waddell's novel Peter Abelard (1933), considering Heloise's fear of women's communities as expression of concerns central to women's writing published in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. Waddell uses Peter Abelard to intervene in these contemporary debates about private and public spaces. The dislike which her Heloise expresses for women's communities may, given the text's feminist ideology, seem surprising, but, as discussed, similar anxieties are voiced in texts by several of Waddell's contemporaries, and the novel is shaped by this tension between private, autonomous individual and shared public space. Peter Abelard is read in relation to selected journalism of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby (late 1920s), Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1928) and Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night (1935).

Keywords:

• Helen Waddell
• Peter Abelard
• Heloise
• Abelard
• feminism
• community
• university

Notes

1 I use Waddell's spellings of names and places throughout.

2 Helen Waddell regarded herself as an Irish writer (see an undated letter from Waddell to Dr Taylor in Corrigan 1990: 183); however, as she lived and published in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s, I discuss Peter Abelard in the context of British literary culture.

3 It may have been a particularly pointed gift for her sister, Meg, whose rather authoritarian husband—whom she called ‘Daddy’—disliked Peter Abelard because he considered that it presented as beautiful, rather than immoral, the sexual relationship of Abelard and Heloise.

4 For further information on Waddell's friendship and intellectual companionship with Clarke, see FitzGerald (2011). As another instance of the multiple connections amongst women writers and academics of the 1920s and 1930s, the literary scholar Rubie Warner, who knew Waddell and Clarke from Queen's College, Belfast, lodged in Oxford with Holtby and Brittain, and offered Waddell a room in the house (FitzGerald 2011: 100).

5 Brittain's ideas are likely to have been influenced by the historian Eileen Power's critically and commercially successful Medieval English Nunneries (1922) and Medieval People (1924); in another instance of the tightly knit scholarly circles of the time, Power and Waddell were friends.

6 These changes came in the wake of the 1876 Enabling Act, which allowed universities or other bodies entitled to grant qualifications for registration to grant these to all persons without distinction of sex; in the wake of this, several university colleges became co-educational.

7 A letter from Waddell to Enid Starkie in 1933 mentions her dislike of women's colleges (FitzGerald 2012: 178).

8 Waddell referred to Lady Wortley Montagu as ‘the inheritor of the double curse, a woman who thinks and feels’ (Waddell 1920: 503). I am grateful to the reviewer of this article for the reference.