9. Archives, autobiography and the professional woman: the personal papers of Mary Agnes Hamilton*

Heidi Egginton

Journalist, translator, novelist, biographer, editor, politician, broadcaster, lecturer, careers adviser, expert on public opinion and social reform: in Mary Agnes Hamilton’s final analysis, her ‘distressingly diversified’ career had been that of a ‘Jack of all trades and master of none, perfectly exemplified’.¹ ‘She is a working brain worker’, Virginia Woolf concluded after one of their first meetings, a summer weekend spent in the company of other pacifist intellectuals at Garsington Manor, Oxfordshire, in the final months of the First World War: ‘Hasn’t a penny of her own; & has the anxious hard working brain of a professional, earning her living all the time.’² Born in 1882 to Scottish parents, Mary Agnes, known as ‘Molly’, and her five siblings grew up amid the academic surroundings of the universities of Manchester, Aberdeen and Glasgow, where her father, Robert Adamson, was a distinguished philosopher. Her mother, Margaret, a botanist and teacher, had been among the earliest women to study at Cambridge, and Molly followed her to Newnham College in 1901 to read classics, then economic history.³ A short and unhappy spell in university teaching after graduation resulted in a short and unhappy marriage to an economist colleague who later became a barrister, Charles Joseph Hamilton; she petitioned for divorce in 1914. She retained her married name for the rest of her life, during which she moved in and out of the professional worlds of journalism, politics, literature and the civil service.

The making of Molly Hamilton’s career provides a useful optic on the complicated path through professional society taken by the daughters of ‘New Women’ Oxbridge graduates, for whom expertise and achievement were rarely rewarded by a linear series of progressive promotions in a clearly defined field or specialism, but were instead forged out of a sequence of adjustments and compromises between the demands of paid work and private life.⁴ The institutional roles for which Hamilton became best known during her lifetime – as Labour MP and as League of Nations delegate in Ramsay MacDonald’s second minority government in 1929–31, and as BBC governor in 1932–6 – she would describe in retrospect as having been characterized by the ‘precarious’ atmosphere of the tumultuous years in domestic and international politics leading up to the Second World War.⁵ It was her precarious career as a writer that supported and defined her position as a public servant, providing her with the means to make a lasting personal contribution towards what she saw as the defining issue of her time: British democracy. In this endeavour, Hamilton was just one representative of a large and varied cohort of relatively privileged but rarely fully recognized women who found that alternative ‘professional settings and audiences’ outside of established professional organizations and networks enabled them to pursue theoretical work on the relationship between individuals, the state and civil society during the mid twentieth century.⁶ A more comprehensive biographical study would trace the threads of Hamilton’s thought and influence across the pages of her novels, newspaper and journal articles, wireless broadcasts, and the reports and papers of the vast array of different government and voluntary committees on which she served. Outside of her salaried roles, her published work ranged widely across political journalism, fiction, literary criticism, history and biography. This chapter focuses on just one, but perhaps the central, component of Hamilton’s intellectual contribution towards what she called ‘the argument for democracy’: her autobiographical writing, which reflected on the position and significance of the professional woman in modern British society and culture.⁷

In so doing, this chapter draws on a small archive of Hamilton’s personal papers which her family donated to the Churchill Archives Centre in 2018.⁸ After Hamilton left the House of Commons in 1931, she remained a perceptive political commentator and her two memoirs, which she devoted principally to a series of pen portraits of her colleagues, are often found among the footnotes to biographies and histories of the interwar period. Catherine Clay, meanwhile, has located Hamilton within a group of middle-class metropolitan women novelists who found their professional work ‘advanced and enlivened’ by the capacious forms of friendship (as well as rivalries and love affairs) generated by writing in this period.⁹ Hamilton’s personal papers contain a series of her wartime diaries, dating from the years when she was compiling her first memoir, Remembering My Good Friends (1944), which highlight in much greater relief than has hitherto been possible the professional collaborations, successes and disappointments of the last phase of her career as a writer and temporary civil servant in the Ministry of Information (MOI) and the Reconstruction Secretariat. Her diaries also demonstrate how the task of supporting women’s entry into professional employment and politics, to which Hamilton and many other middle-class organizers and intellectuals had turned their attention during the 1920s and 1930s, developed after the outbreak of the Second World War. Read together with her published works of autobiography (though this was a term Hamilton herself rejected, and her rejection of it became key to her sense of herself as a professional), her diaries show how the material practices of life-writing and record-keeping can evolve in later life.¹⁰ As unpublished documents, they illuminate questions about the gendered forms of cultural production available to women who devoted themselves to public service, and about the way the politics of collecting and cataloguing that evidence ultimately condition how women’s professional work is remembered.

This chapter looks firstly at Hamilton’s particular approach to composing her diaries and first memoir in the context of a blossoming culture of life-writing during the 1930s and early 1940s. It then goes on to consider how the practice of committing her personal ‘reminiscences’ to paper in wartime influenced how she navigated the male-dominated worlds of professional recruitment, parliamentary politics and post-war reconstruction, and in turn how her experiences of work conditioned the ways she thought about women’s role in democratic society. As an enquiry into the relationship between archives and autobiography, this is a study of a thoroughly modern woman who – as the biographer Lisa Cohen has shown was the tendency of women who worked ‘precariously at the edges’ of their professions in this period – both ‘memorialised herself and colluded in her own invisibility’.¹¹

‘The rickety frame work of a war-time diary’

The earliest surviving personal diary in Hamilton’s archive opens with entries written aboard an ocean liner in January 1938, at which point she was embarking on a lecture tour in the United States, and covers the period until the final entry, written on V-J Day in August 1945. There are hints that maintaining a descriptive journal as a means to organize her thoughts and record memories both of her personal experiences and of world events was not a new exercise, but she was evidently prompted to continue this set of diaries as a serious writing project by the rising international tensions in Europe and the outbreak of war. By 25 August 1939, the day on which she declared she had sent a completed manuscript of her latest novel to her publisher, Jonathan Cape (not before painting ‘windows and lampshades’), she had ‘[d]etermined to keep [sic] proper diary’.¹² She thus began what she later came to call her ‘war diary’ in a cloth-covered notebook purchased in Rouen, which she had visited in the summer of 1939 with two of her sisters and one of her closest college friends and neighbours, Dorothy Shuckburgh.¹³ Hamilton continued to document her work, conversations and her daily life in her Chelsea flat and offices in central London in a series of ring-bound pocket notebooks, the first of which she labelled ‘War (2)’, indicating that she meant to continue until the conflict had reached its denouement (Figure 9.1). The diaries contained notes and ideas for her first memoir, but Hamilton also came to see the act of composing a diary as an important part of her contribution to the war effort in its own right.

Figure 9.1. First page of Mary Agnes Hamilton’s diary entitled ‘War (2)’, 12–13 Feb. 1940. Papers of Mary Agnes Hamilton, HMTN 1/4, Churchill Archives Centre.

In the growing body of scholarship on selfhood and subjectivities in twentieth-century Britain, the rituals of self-conscious diary-keeping during the Second World War have loomed large in historians’ studies of the ways in which writers and other articulate individuals ‘used available cultural resources to weave meaningful narratives of their personal identities’.¹⁴ Joe Moran has identified the mid twentieth century as a moment when the routine habit of maintaining a diary using inexpensive personal stationery as a receptacle for social engagements, reminiscences and other ‘notes to self’ gained a specific cultural purchase, including through the ‘anthropology of ourselves’ assembled from the testimonies of anonymous diarists by Mass Observation.¹⁵ From the 1930s, as Deborah Cohen, Matt Houlbrook and others have shown, the rise of popular cultures of confession together with a new emphasis on privacy and the growing interest in measuring and responding to ‘public opinion’ had seen the private diary cross-pollinate with other works of ‘life-writing’ intended for popular consumption, so that interiorized reflections on public affairs often came to share stylistic elements with published works of middlebrow fiction, human interest journalism and biography.¹⁶ It was the combination of these trends with the unprecedented disruption to civilians’ everyday lives during the war that enabled the ‘intimate histories’ contained in war diaries to be seen as significant ‘repositories of collective memory’.¹⁷ Even if a war diary had been written for its author’s eyes only, it still had the potential to become a space for both ‘off-duty’ rehearsal and the performance of one’s public role during a heightened period of global peril.¹⁸

Scholars of the huge variety of life-writing generated in, and about, war have profitably studied texts such as the private diary through the lens of ‘composure’.¹⁹ This has revealed, on the one hand, the traces of mainstream cultural narratives within personal testimonies of the Second World War and the way those traces interacted with the imprint of gender and other factors, including class, region and age, to produce individual subjectivities.²⁰ On the other, it has uncovered the ways in which war diarists’ unconscious responses to large-scale historical forces as well as the mysteries of the human heart could be registered on a minute scale in the emotional texture of their writing.²¹ Hamilton’s personal papers highlight how the social act of composing one’s self can also usefully be explored in its creative and material senses, that is, as ‘composition’. The practice of putting her everyday life, reading and conversations down on paper in the diaries she carried with her as she moved between home and work in a city at war – ‘it is actually one of the few things one can do in an air raid’, she reminded herself in October 1940, as a spur to begin writing in a new notebook – would exert its own influence on the direction of her career.²² Faced with war work in which the full range of her talents went underused, her diaries became a space in which she not only recorded the extraordinary events and the mundanities of civilian life in wartime and reckoned with the emotional trauma of the conflict, but also decided which of her memories she would weave into her memoirs. The history of her surviving personal papers after her death in 1966, moreover, would continue to shape the way she is remembered as a professional in connection with her friends and colleagues. Historians tend to ‘look through’ material practices of composure like writing and archival collecting, but these practices underpin the creation of personal testimonies and their relationship to subjectivity.²³

If the discipline of daily diary-writing had become widespread during the early twentieth century, it was a material form of expression particularly suited to Hamilton’s life as a temporary civil servant. Living mostly in her own flat on her own means, her home, books and papers would not be destroyed in the bombing, as her fellow author Rose Macaulay’s were in 1941.²⁴ Her diaries record in detail the physical and emotional toll of ‘total war’, but they also suggest that she was able to indulge in some luxuries and hobbies – staying with friends outside London, building furniture, shopping for clothes or making an evening dress out of black-out fabric – as a coping mechanism and a creative interlude from her writing.²⁵ Nor did Hamilton’s wartime service, which combined work on propaganda and reconstruction with voluntary roles for several women’s and social welfare organizations, preclude her from spending time on her own intellectual pursuits. This was despite the fact that diary-keeping and other forms of private communication became a security concern in the later years of the war; indeed, Hamilton’s own diary covering the period between November 1942 and March 1943 was confiscated for ‘careful reading by Censor’ at customs upon her return from the US, where she had been sent as a speaker to promote the Beveridge Report.²⁶ A public figure whose frequent travels abroad during the 1930s had often combined the professional with the personal, attending to the physical matter of her diary, memoirs and ‘papers’, along with her clothing and furnishing, was a crucial part of the way she adjusted to the shock of having to prepare for what seemed certain to be an unwelcome form of displacement at the end of August 1939:

Meantime I move almost restlessly: packing up fur coat and sending it off: removing carpet, tearing up papers and generally putting things in order as if for a long journey. Eliz. [Hamilton’s housekeeper] is magnificently calm, and goes on with her work as if nothing were happening. That is the general note; it is noticeable that no one in a shop or bus says anything about the crisis and looks at you with mild surprise if you do, as if it were bad form. Talked to [illegible] Finally began my ‘Remembering My Good Friends’ since one must do something.²⁷

Two days later, she was moved to continue working on her personal papers by a similar sense of unease at the speed with which events were progressing, noting ‘we are being told little while efforts go on. Nasty rumour that R[ussian] troops are massing on Polish frontier … Sandbags assembling in great masses everywhere … The very busy are enviable at the moment.’ In the midst of this unsettling atmosphere, she declared again: ‘I am trying to write reminiscences, not, if I can help it, of myself, but of my friends.’²⁸

The memoirs that resulted from Hamilton’s aversion to writing ‘of herself’ during the war used her own educational milieu, campaigning work, writing career and institutional roles as windows on to the working lives of what she called the ‘contacts’ and ‘associations’ she had made in different professional settings. This form owed much to the encounters with people recorded in her personal papers. Reviewing Remembering My Good Friends for the Spectator, her former BBC colleague Janet Adam Smith noticed the imprint of Hamilton’s ‘diary’ in her ‘verbless telegraphese’ and ‘sprawling’ sentences.²⁹ Hamilton admitted the book was ‘disjointed and imperfect’, stressing that ‘“national service” has taken most of the hours of the day and filled most of its thoughts’. Although she omitted much of her war service from this memoir, it was inevitably marked by her own paid work on propaganda and morale for the MOI. Hamilton could draw on familiar cultural tropes of resilience when she declared that no one single ‘personal life’ mattered more than ‘human courage, endurance and faith’, than ‘what we have gone through together in our minds’.³⁰ Yet her diary shows that she chose to pursue life-writing partly as an antidote to war work, which by the autumn of 1940 she found she was already becoming resigned to finding ‘dull, monotonous’ and devoid of ‘creativity’. ‘Perhaps through this process of accommodation one may reach a stage when something rather more constructive becomes possible’, she reasoned, ‘even if it goes no further than the fitting in of back reminiscences into the rickety frame work of a war-time diary.’³¹ Though the diary may have been an inelegant technology of the self, it was the form that gave her the chance not to dwell on ‘the shrinkage of life’ under the Blitz but on ‘some of the good elements that can’t be taken’, including art, literature and her social connections.³²

As an early woman parliamentarian and professional, Hamilton was by no means unusual in devoting an ostensibly personal account of her own career to what one reviewer deemed to be a mere ‘album of portraits’ of her predecessors and contemporaries.³³ Her second memoir and last book-length work of non-fiction, Up-hill All the Way (1953), would expand on her wartime approach to situate the life histories of members of her wide circle of ‘friends’ within the context of civil society as a whole, as her argument for democracy. Reviewing it for Truth in 1954, the young critic Bernard Levin surmised that Hamilton had eschewed ‘the fashionable, introspective autobiography’ and called the life that emerged from the book ‘shadowy’, ‘placid’, ‘homely’ and ‘meek’.³⁴ Krista Cowman has pointed out that the memoirs of the first women Labour MPs deliberately did not take on the form of conventionally masculine works of individualistic autobiography, but nor did they emulate the domestic narratives of struggle published by earlier socialist women campaigners; instead, as women who had assumed positions of power within a male-dominated field, they looked outwards to focus on the complexities of their relationship to their peers and to the public.³⁵ When Hamilton put pen to paper to write her own memoirs in August 1939, she had already established a reputation as a biographer of women and men in the labour movement.³⁶ In the mid-1930s, she had also written an experimental ‘informal biography’ of Newnham and its notable personalities, beginning with a chapter listing her cohort’s professional achievements.³⁷ The ‘friendship album’ she would publish in 1944 was thus not a retreat from the traumas and trivialities of her everyday life to the feminine worlds of conversation and companionship.³⁸ It was a confrontation with her own past and an extension of her practice as an author.

In devoting her most autobiographical writing in her later life to a series of biographical portraits of her friends and colleagues, then, Hamilton was not erasing her own personal contributions to British public life or to the war effort but amplifying them. She envied her sister Margot’s collection of war poems, written while an Air Raid Precautions warden in Welwyn during the Blitz under the working title ‘Civilian Duty’, and evidently saw her reminiscences as part of the same national project: ‘a much worthier fulfilment of that title than my diary could possibly be’.³⁹ Although she seems not to have consciously emulated the long-form ethnographic and self-examining techniques of the Mass Observers, her own war diaries and memoirs (she reminded herself in her notebook after a month of ‘slow progress’ on her other writing in January 1942) were ‘planned as a contribution to democracy – to that faith in which is so wonky’.⁴⁰ In June 1941, when the looming threat of invasion and what she described bitterly as a ‘cigarette famine’ had cast a long shadow over her work, this ‘faith’ had become central to her writing.

Meditating in bed I ask myself how it is that I ‘realise’ this war less than in 1914. Is it that age blunts one? I think not: I think it is that one dreads the overwhelming effect of the sense of cruelty and pain existing wherever G[ermany] is on top: that it is literally too bad to bear … Last time one knew the end was certain … Then, one could afford to take in and dwell on the horror: now, one must keep the mind fixed on the point of faith. The extraction of and dwelling on evil in the clever modern novel is doing the Nazi work.

The ‘completely muddled’ manuscript of a new novel she had sent off to her own publisher on the eve of the war no longer seemed to adequately counter this evil: the only ‘scheme’ that could, she concluded, would be ‘the concealed autobiography’.⁴¹ Part of what would result from this project of writing her memoirs through the lives of her contemporaries was the confirmation of her belief in a generalized ‘spirit of God’ binding humans together, which provided the foundation for both her socialist politics and her conviction in the special part which artists had to play in society. But her first memoir was also to reaffirm her belief in the importance of her role as a woman who had, through ‘luck’, been able to occupy several different positions in the professional world: ‘my dispersed form of work meant wide and various contacts’ with those ‘in whom the good is more significant and operative than the bad’.⁴²

Though it may have been unfashionable, Hamilton’s distinctive approach to life-writing illustrates how the entwined cultures of privacy and confession expressed in the composition of personal testimonies before the war could inform the rising cultural purchase of ‘ordinariness’ in its aftermath.⁴³ The quietly radical contribution Hamilton made through her ‘concealed autobiography’ was to uphold the importance, and indeed the ordinariness, of the creative role of the professional woman in democratic society. By the time she published her second memoir, aged seventy-one, she could describe herself as ‘a specimen of the ordinary’ precisely because of her ‘incoherent and “bitty”’ career, and her share of ‘illness’, ‘distress’ and ‘unemployment’: ‘This very scattered and miscellaneous experience does mean that I have known a very wide range of the people, and a large number of the institutions, on which democracy depends.’ Her ‘claim’ to expertise as a writer on democracy in touch with the ‘normal man’, she declared, was not that her career had been out of the ordinary, but that she wanted ‘for others what I want for myself’.⁴⁴ The complex task of negotiating her own path through professional society while attending to the issues of less fortunate women’s professional employment had occupied her throughout the 1930s, and was how she strove to participate in the war effort before obtaining an official position at the MOI in February 1940.

‘A little army of highly-paid women’

Women’s work was a central concern of Hamilton’s war diary: her most lyrical and descriptive passages are reserved for the weather, musings on the drama of war, personal relationships – and other people’s employment. Even before she assumed her role as a careers adviser, she appeared to have an instinctive interest in who was working where and who they were working with, what the conditions were like for women, how much autonomy or ‘scope’ they had in their work, what they wore and how much they earned. ‘Odd to me that life should require “professional women,’ an irritated Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary soon after meeting Hamilton at an earlier point in both their publishing careers, when the two writers were in their mid-thirties.⁴⁵ By the spring of 1919, Woolf had identified Hamilton as the type of woman who already seemed to be at ease charting a course through the new professional society. At gatherings with mutual friends she noticed Hamilton’s tendency to catalogue the careers of those around her, and the way she defined her own ‘professional’ identity through her papers:

Mrs. Hamilton made me feel a little professional, for she had her table strewn with manuscripts, a book open on the desk, & she began by asking me about my novel; & then we talked about reviewing, & I was interested to hear who had reviewed Martin Schüler, & was a little ashamed of being interested.

In Woolf’s eyes, Hamilton had the persona of a Victorian lady journalist, with female friendships based only on an economy of sharing ‘bits of literary gossip’.⁴⁶ But Hamilton’s interest in the social reality which lay behind women’s professional opportunities would become central to her thinking on the progress of British democracy, and it is worth exploring the ways these conversations figured in the composition of her diary and her published writing during the war in more depth.

The monitoring of women’s progress in the professions was an important aspect of the movement towards economic equality after the extension of the franchise. During the 1930s, Hamilton had acted as an ‘Expert Adviser’ to the Cambridge University Women’s Appointments Board (CUWAB) and the Women’s Employment Federation (WEF), two of a number of mid-twentieth-century organizations dedicated to smoothing women’s path into professional employment and winning the arguments for their access to higher grades and salaries. The WEF, Hamilton explained in her last and most fulsome pen portrait in Remembering My Good Friends, of its indomitable founder and her close friend, Ray Strachey, acted as an exclusive ‘clearing-house of knowledge, experience and contacts’.⁴⁷ Both the WEF and the CUWAB (of which Strachey was chairman from its establishment in 1930) looked beyond conventional fields in which women had already gained stable footholds and instead interested themselves in a wide range of professions, including the civil service ‘at home and abroad’, law, journalism, industry and commerce, research, advertising and public relations, librarianship and architecture.⁴⁸ They focused on manoeuvring women into posts offering salaries above £300 a year with potential for ‘progressive’ promotion – deliberately helping them to avoid ‘Casual and blind alley work’.⁴⁹ The WEF survived on grants from the Carnegie Trust, but after September 1939 it came into conflict over civilian employment with the Ministry of Labour, which also maintained a women’s register.⁵⁰

Along with the novelty of the blackouts, and an all-pervading sense of fear providing an eerie contrast with a spell of ‘glorious’ weather in London, Hamilton experienced the first days of war in terms of the loss of paid work for women. She joined Ray Strachey at the WEF’s sun-warmed premises at Bedford College in Regent’s Park in early September 1939 to interview professionals seeking war work, partly as a way of avoiding the silent horror of ‘solitary thought’, and found herself confronted with a situation of a different magnitude to the caseload she would have had during the 1930s.

Already unemployment falls – masses of people. Businesses and shops closing – from Eliz. Arden type to ordinary commercial. We saw rows of highly effective women asking for £250 up who don’t know what to do next. There is no early prospect of government employment. It is of course the same with men, and also of course is an ‘early phase’ phenomenon – but it is pretty grim at the moment.

She sensed the same urgent need for occupation among her interviewees, some of whom even longed for an ‘ignoble peace’. By contrast, meeting women like Mary Glasgow, who had already been transferred from her work as a school inspector ‘to Intelligence (Balkans)’ and was ‘too well pleased with herself’, brought back difficult memories; a few days later, after hearing similar accounts from other women friends, Hamilton noted with regret that ‘those happy war workers are with us again’. But her interviewing throughout the autumn of 1939 was cheering, giving her a ‘remarkable picture of the work women were doing – and all over the world’.⁵¹

Ensuring that women could access the same professional opportunities as men played a central role in Hamilton’s thinking on democracy, but she was clear-sighted about the prejudices which limited or expanded the vast majority of women’s working lives.⁵² She and Strachey hoped that the WEF could be brought under the auspices of the Ministry of Labour in order to establish a ‘new and hon. professional exchange for men and women’, with Ray installed as head of the women’s section.⁵³ This enterprise would have been the culmination of a long project for both women. After leaving Newnham with the equivalent of a first-class honours degree, Hamilton had her professional ambitions checked by the old-fashioned Central Bureau for the Employment of Women; Strachey would later clash with the bureau in setting up the WEF during the 1930s. Hamilton’s only options, she had been told in 1904, were secretarial work or teaching, and she duly took the latter.⁵⁴ This left her convinced, she admitted in her first memoir, that ‘typing, for the university-trained woman, is an accomplishment to be concealed; once admit to it, and you are graded in a class from which it is hard to escape’.⁵⁵ Hamilton’s pragmatic, equal-rights-based feminism was rooted in her socialism: she claimed to identify with all those who were ‘in the common boat’ with no ‘unearned resources’.⁵⁶ Her autobiographical writings also highlighted the significance of women’s unemployment, a difficult subject during the 1930s, when raising the goal of securing women’s right to employment at all grades was often interpreted as a threat to men’s work and wages.⁵⁷ Hamilton herself had already established a public reputation as a high earner, being one of only three women to enter the BBC at over £500 a year before 1939.⁵⁸ Press reports to which Strachey contributed comments on her work for the WEF had characterized Hamilton as a member of a ‘little army of highly-paid women’ who were earning four-figure salaries.⁵⁹ But this is likely to have been an exaggerated figure, masking the periods when she relied on income from publishing and speaking fees to fill in the gaps between her salaried employment; Hamilton’s first salary cheque from the MOI in 1940, where she joined at £600 a year, was ‘an agreeable thing since it is a long time since any have come in’.⁶⁰

Despite, or perhaps because of, the professional comradeship she could draw on as a Newnham graduate and her own periods of success, Hamilton was attuned to younger women’s under-remunerated and unacknowledged service. She used her diaries to record the way their relations with male colleagues could serve to restrict women’s access to outlets for their distinctive forms of expertise. The experience of her neighbour Dorothy Shuckburgh’s niece at the War Office illustrated ‘the eternal trouble of women kept down in junior posts, badly paid, yet doing resp[onsible] work’.⁶¹ Hamilton also noted reports of the Ministry of Labour ‘treating women’ badly, ‘especially the highly qualified ones – if they get them in’.⁶² She was wryly amused to hear her friend Ruth Dalton had been ‘accused of “taking too much upon herself” in her work’; Dalton, during a period of separation from her husband, was occupied as a liaison officer with women armaments factory workers in Manchester for the Ministry of Supply. ‘She is inclined to be bossy’, Hamilton admitted, ‘but this sounds like the resentment of the inefficient against the efficient.’⁶³ Underlying her dismay at women getting swept up in ‘intrigues’ at the BBC and inside the wartime ministries throughout the conflict was a conviction that women had as much right as men to autonomy and freedom of expression as professionals outside their institutional roles – especially as women’s paid positions tended to be unfulfilling. During the months when Hamilton was most deeply engaged with the WEF, she had helped place her friend Ilse Hellman, an Austrian Jewish refugee whom she had supported in obtaining exemption from internment in the autumn of 1939, as an assistant to the Strachey family. Hamilton soon came to regret this, since in looking after Ray’s grandchild the talented child psychoanalyst had ‘no time for her own work’.⁶⁴

If Hamilton was the consummate ‘professional woman’, as a professional writer she was aware that she occupied what Alison Light has called ‘that vast and ill-defined middle ground between the dedicated artist and the full-time journalist’.⁶⁵ This is in evidence in Woolf’s interwar diaries, where Hamilton is depicted as one of the ‘strugglers’, more concerned with money than with art.⁶⁶ For her part Hamilton tended to depict her own status as a ‘second-line’ artist as a strength, maintaining it could never dim her ‘determination to go on writing’.⁶⁷ Although she may have had a room of her own (during her years as a journalist and MP, Hamilton lived in a ‘tiny flat’ at the Adelphi, near Westminster), Woolf guessed that much of her writing was not carried out in reflective solitude: she ‘dashes it off, I imagine, on blocks of paper, on her knee, at the House of Commons perhaps; or in the Tube’.⁶⁸ After joining the Review of Reviews on £570 a year in December 1920, Hamilton met Woolf, who wrote sardonically of her announcement: ‘And her mother can live in London; & she’s launched; poor Molly can do all this by chaining herself to the desk. There the desk was & books laid out as you see them in shops.’⁶⁹ Two years later, Woolf imagined this type of writing life merely gave Hamilton stale, solitary evenings of work and ‘impersonal’ relationships with her male editors and superiors.⁷⁰ Hamilton gave her ‘friendship’ with the Woolfs prominent positions in both her memoirs, but admitted she knew Virginia thought little of her work. If Woolf had felt she was always being studied by Hamilton for inclusion in one of her ‘second-rate’ novels, Hamilton wrote that her abiding memory of a weekend with Woolf in 1923 was of being ‘on the dissecting table’, and concluded: ‘I was, for her, a specimen of that, to her, queer object – the normal human being.’⁷¹

It quickly became obvious after war had broken out that the professional dreams Hamilton had fulfilled in the 1920s and 1930s and wanted for her younger contemporaries would be dashed amid confused and contradictory propaganda messaging and the anxieties that continued to swirl around women’s skilled employment.⁷² One of the last conversations with Strachey that Hamilton recorded in her diary took place on the eve of Ray’s unsuccessful deputation with a group of women MPs to present the case for women professionals to the Treasury in February 1940. The two women, Hamilton wrote in her diary, had spoken of their hopes for the creation of a national minimum wage and family endowments, backed by the trade unions.⁷³ Strachey passed away suddenly after an operation a few months later and, in the absence of her friend’s ‘grand vitality’, Hamilton, by then employed at the MOI, redirected her efforts as a writer towards the problem of women’s work and the relationship between women’s different social roles.⁷⁴ In December 1939 she had begun research and interviews with women trade union secretaries and organizers for a study published as Women at Work (1941), a ‘tangled’ mixture of history and polemic on the issue of trade unionism for ‘women who work, whether in their homes or outside them’.⁷⁵ It identified women’s ‘transience’ in the formal workplace, as they moved between being single, being married and raising children, as the main obstacle to effective union organizing and the reason women were ‘often not taken seriously as workers (least of all when promotion is in question)’. In an elegant response to the signs of the resurgence of traditional ideas about women’s roles, Hamilton argued that women’s increasing status and pay within professions such as entertainment and politics would help set the standards for greater freedom, respect and mutuality in other areas of life, including the home.⁷⁶ She continued to puzzle over the question of equality in these fields in her life-writing as the prospect of re-entering parliamentary politics came into view in the final years of the war.

Things that matter

‘I am at a bad loose end,’ Hamilton confided to her diary in January 1944: ‘no work at office, none of my own on the stocks.’ It was the act of ‘[l]ooking over [sic] old diary’ which had given her ‘intense dissatisfaction; and a recognition that I am quite considerably to blame’.⁷⁷ On the previous day she had read in a newspaper – ‘no word from T[ransport] House’, she added in brackets – that Labour had selected a local councillor for the Kirkcaldy Burghs by-election, a position which she had been asked to put herself forward for as a prospective parliamentary candidate a few months earlier.⁷⁸ Hamilton’s efforts to grapple with her memories of her complex relationship with Labour politics and politicians in her life-writing played an important role in shaping her thinking on the impact that women’s entry into the professions had on social life and democracy in Britain. In the 1930s she had been a sharp critic of the double standards under which woman politicians suffered, particularly regarding their looks and their treatment in the press.⁷⁹ Of all the institutions she had known as a professional she ultimately decided it was the London County Council, in which she had served as a Labour alderman in the late 1930s, that had shown her what it was like for women to be ‘treated on a footing of perfect equality’, able to ‘pull their weight without fuss or self-assertion’.⁸⁰ In this, her experiences broadly confirm the findings of historians of women in the interwar Labour Party, who note that these women were able to make the most significant progress in larger numbers in local and municipal politics.⁸¹ Later in her life, however, the House of Commons was where Hamilton remembered having encountered the most ‘kindness’, ‘fraternity’ and ‘comradeship’, and it continued to form the backdrop to her professional imaginary long after she left. The decade of hard campaigning work she had undertaken for Labour in the 1920s before being elected resurfaced in her thoughts as London came under sustained aerial attack in the autumn of 1940 and the prospect of making peace with those with whom she had ‘quarrel[led]’ in the event she did not survive the war gradually came into sharper focus. Writing ‘an hour every evening at autobiography’ was the best way to ‘make terms with this strange life we live’, she thought, but

[t]he difficulty there remains – can I ever tell the truth about JRM [J. Ramsay MacDonald], and, if I don’t what a gap covers 1919 to 1929. If written faithfully, there is a cautionary story there – more against me I’m afraid: but perhaps that fact is the justification for attempting it. One cannot go on just dodging the bombs.⁸²

Having returned to this period of her life in her diaries and memoirs, she chose not to elaborate further on her relationship with MacDonald, with whom it has been speculated she had been in ‘political love’ during the 1920s, before becoming disillusioned with his approach.⁸³ Instead, Parliament became the place where she decided her professionalism had first been taken for granted by her male colleagues, despite being one of only nine Labour women MPs elected in 1929. ‘In the House’, she declared in her final book, ‘you are an M.P. – tout court.’⁸⁴

Although Hamilton published a murder mystery set in the Palace of Westminster (Murder in the House of Commons, 1931), shortly after declining to join the National Government and losing her seat, it was only on the publication of her second memoir that she revealed she had used an earlier novel, Folly’s Handbook (1927), to ‘transpose’ the setting and characters of Parliament to the world of grand opera.⁸⁵ The plot focused on the glittering rise of a celebrity opera singer, Rachel Chandos, and the women and men in her orbit. The blurb proclaimed Rachel to be ‘a new thing in fiction – a woman and artist, with a career and a will behind it strong as any man’s’. But it is her lover, the Scottish barrister and writer Mark Ireton, who acts as an advocate for Hamilton’s socialist politics and her emerging views on work, friendship and professionalism; a violinist, until a war wound prevented him from playing, it is Ireton who Hamilton suggests has the more genuine appreciation for music and art.⁸⁶ The novel is composed of a number of interweaving narratives of unrequited love, each of which serves to expose different facets of what it meant to succeed as a professional in the early 1920s. Mark’s affair with Rachel can only continue in secret asides and stolen moments, often literally behind closed doors, as the singer is shown to struggle to craft her own identity when surrounded by impresarios: Chandos was a member of a profession which had ‘its own laws, its own atmosphere, its own personnel, which touched that of other worlds at the smallest number of points’.⁸⁷ It is Rachel’s world that ultimately wins out, as she forces Mark to betray an old musician friend for the sake of her own financial support, with tragic consequences.

Read as a study of professional achievement and unfulfilled potential, Folly’s Handbook shows how women’s creative and political work had begun to disrupt contemporary gender dynamics. It would be too reductive to see Chandos as a cipher for MacDonald, whom Hamilton remembered as one of the most mercurial male ‘personalities’ she had worked closely with in the Labour Party, but she may have drawn on elements of his leadership and the disappointments of their professional friendship in her portrayal of the opera singer.⁸⁸ If Mark and Rachel’s doomed romance highlighted the impossibility of combining love, art and celebrity, however, it also depicted women’s ambition and competence as a powerful force shaping their relationships with less exceptional but more senior men. The character in the novel whose experiences may have most closely resembled some of Hamilton’s own was that of Mark’s sister, Sophy Ireton, an aspiring parliamentary candidate. Though she too is absorbed in an affair, with an older and unsuitably mediocre MP, Sophy is shown to be completely committed to her profession, her romantic devotion evidently another aspect of her love for her work. She lives in a down-at-heel flat ‘near King’s Cross’ with a single female friend who ‘was always either just coming from a meeting or just going to one’. Mark is able to see that she disturbs their mother with her ‘tendency to devote her earnings to subscriptions instead of to clothes’ and her ‘proud and self-contained’ determination to ‘manage her own life and, if necessary, make a mess of it in her own way’.⁸⁹

Hamilton’s entry in Who’s Who begins with her election as an MP in 1929, but the unconventional and costly work of unofficial political organizing as a woman had been a thread running through her earlier, unofficial career. As she later told it, she had been able to cultivate her talents for public speaking and political argument at Newnham, where she was a member of a debating club called Things That Matter and was elected Liberal prime minister in the college’s political society.⁹⁰ In both her memoirs she connected her early training in economics at Cambridge directly to her introduction to socialist and pacifist politics through the Independent Labour Party and the Union of Democratic Control during the First World War.⁹¹ Yet, when still living with her husband and mother-in-law, she was recorded in the 1911 census as a ‘Secretary to Philanthropic Society’, a practical, if not necessarily political, form of employment she might have combined with writing the historical textbooks for children and translations she published around the same time.⁹² Hamilton’s description of her work as ‘the chores of a rank and filer’ in the period following her divorce in 1914, before she was able to stand officially as a Labour candidate for the first time, in Chatham, aged forty-one, in 1923, also belie assumptions about the relatively smooth path into parliamentary politics she appeared to enjoy as a trusted friend of MacDonald and a middle-class intellectual.⁹³ Her first memoir hinted at the physical exertion the work had demanded even before her selection:

canvassing, addressing envelopes in dark and often dank committee rooms, distributing leaflets, speaking at meetings, generally small, in other people’s constituencies, ‘filling in’ until the candidate arrived; attending branch meetings, going to conferences; getting to know what, in the Labour Party, we call ‘the movement’.

From 1924 until her election for Blackburn in 1929, Hamilton had divided her time between small lodgings in London and Lancashire, campaigning and making herself known among local women until she became ‘a citizen of the town’ (Figure 9.2).⁹⁴ Like that of many of the women professionals in Precarious Professionals, Hamilton’s dedication now reads almost as exploitation, especially her delight, when an MP, in serving as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Clement Attlee, for which she received a desk in his ‘dank little room in the basement’ and the chance to have ‘great talks with Clem, notably when we had to sit up all night’.⁹⁵ Yet in her appraisal, after she returned to her time in Parliament in her second memoir, a ‘queer but real unspoken shared idealism makes electioneering fascinating, and redeems its fatigues and disappointments’.⁹⁶

The composition of this narrative took place while Hamilton weighed up the possibility of re-entering the House of Commons. She recorded the option of standing for election as an MP again in her war diary as early as November 1939. After a day spent interviewing women for the WEF, she had supper with the MP and author George Ridley, formerly a union official under the second Labour MP in Hamilton’s old double-member constituency, and a close friend. He told her that if she wanted a new seat: ‘I must do meetings and get them reported, write letters to News and Herald and generally project myself against having been out so long.’ This left Hamilton with ‘that stuffy view of the H. of C. I often feel: the complete absorption in their own atmosphere’.⁹⁷ Her diary shows that she kept a watchful eye on her former colleagues at Labour women’s conferences and in the press throughout the war, remaining as sceptical of the ‘over-driven’ women MPs’ methods as she had been of the idea of forming a cross-party women’s group while in Parliament; her allegiance had always been to her party first and foremost.⁹⁸ Ridley died suddenly of a stroke in January 1944 as Hamilton waited for the results of the Kirkcaldy selection, and the loss of her most significant remaining party confidante at the point at which her political ambitions had reawakened came as a shattering blow.⁹⁹ She briefly considered putting her name forward for another Lancashire constituency in September 1944, before deciding ‘nothing will come of it’, then stood, unsuccessfully, for selection in Kensington North in the spring of 1945, knowing the seat looked likely to be captured by Labour for the first time since 1929. ‘I fancy work could win it’, she pondered in her diary after meeting the other, male candidates, ‘but who is going to do the work?’¹⁰⁰

Figure 9.2. Mary Agnes Hamilton electioneering in Blackburn, c.1929. Unknown photographer. Papers of Mary Agnes Hamilton, HMTN 2/1, p. 7, Churchill Archives Centre.

‘One remained an inferior animal’

In her second memoir Hamilton described her decision not to stand for Parliament in 1945 as a simple ‘refusal’, based on her ‘feeling of being too ancient to be confident of standing the strain’; this verdict was later supported by the overwork and untimely death of her Labour colleague Ellen Wilkinson. But she inserted a memory of hearing rumours that her section of the MOI was about to be transferred to the Foreign Office as her main justification, since it gave her the best opportunity she had yet had in her career to dedicate herself to public service (Figure 9.3). ‘I was already fascinated by the kind of work that gives an insight into the machine and what makes it go; in a “real” Government Department one could learn about this, even if, as a Temp. one remained an inferior animal.’¹⁰¹ Her diaries suggest that this feeling of being part of the ‘machine’ was what both motivated her and made her privately despair of her work as a public servant, shining new light on the meanings of professional success for a woman who had known several different bureaucratic institutions intimately before the war.

Figure 9.3. Mary Agnes Hamilton at her desk in Carlton House Terrace, c.1948. Unknown photographer. Papers of Mary Agnes Hamilton, HMTN 2/1, p. 17, Churchill Archives Centre.

Hamilton was one of a large number of writers and intellectuals drawn into the MOI. Her notes from her first days at work in the General Production division in February 1940 confirm the classic picture of the ministry as a refuge for amateurs – ‘a vast machine aligned to no clear purpose’, as she put it – so much so that she began to find it hard to write.¹⁰²

This diary is going to pieces … But 10–7 in this place where the sense of frustration is heavier than lead, makes it very hard. Long hours are more tiring when nothing comes of them than they would be if we were getting on with the job. The head of our Dept. has no notion of organising or of using his staff; result, everyone is annoyed and no-one knows what they’re doing.

During her first period at the MOI in 1940–41, Hamilton’s energies were mostly directed towards propaganda literature aimed at boosting domestic morale – though by the end of her first day at the ministry she was already busying herself with her diary in her new office (‘Whether I shall ever be really busy I don’t know: it looks as though I might do jobs of my own at this very uncomfortable table’).¹⁰³ She appreciated Frank Pick’s bracing if chaotic reorganization of the MOI in the summer of 1940 and found Kenneth Clark, the new head of her department, to be a congenial superior and committee man, even if she was briefly moved into a new section ominously known as ‘Other Activities’.¹⁰⁴ At the same time, she came to dread constant plotting between the Publications and General Production divisions, and criticism of the pamphlets to which she contributed, while the work of her section was made no less complicated by the paper shortage. And she soon found her ability to continue her memoir in her spare moments dwindling in the Blitz. ‘My head is perfectly muzzy’, she wrote in the ministry’s shelter on 31 August 1940, an air-raid warning having deprived her and her colleagues of their lunch, ‘and it is more than time it stopped for a bit: no idea has visited me for a long time.’¹⁰⁵ Hamilton was interested in the schemes of her colleague and fellow writer Graham Greene, who, she confided to her diary, had been using ‘his peculiar novelist’s eye’ to turn the other members of the ministry into fictional characters, but suspected that he, too, believed himself merely a part in a dramatic performance.¹⁰⁶

Increasing Hamilton’s scepticism about the work of the MOI in the winter of 1940–41 was the prospect of another, weightier role in planning for post-war reconstruction. In late November she was summoned to lunch with Attlee at the House of Commons to discuss a transfer to the secretariat of the Cabinet’s committee on ‘Reconstruction and Peace Aims’. Over the next few weeks she recorded agonized conversations on the transfer in her diary. Ridley advised her to stay at the MOI, while her director felt their division ‘now ha[d] a chance to be something’ and attempted to convince her that ‘the doom of frustration’ would also hang over the task of planning for peace. Clark, however, agreed with Hamilton: ‘there is nothing doing here’. Though, as she also reminded herself, the offer ‘may of course not materialise’. By the middle of January 1941, her former Labour colleagues were conspiring to help her make up her mind, and she was offered a side role as a ‘working’ vice-chairman of the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) – ‘Herbert M[orrison] it seems has suggested that I could take time off from job to do this’ – which she decided would ‘fit in very well: one would have an outside set of contacts of great use in the other work’.¹⁰⁷

A week later, as she prepared to leave the MOI, Hamilton was writing that she had finally started to ‘feel an affection for some aspects’ of the place. An effusive diary entry followed on the supper conversations she had shared with her colleagues about ‘books and the future of schools … films … Rumour and Hospitals’, and on the Senate House basement, where (after working on her trade unions book ‘after dinner’) she often slept in a bunkbed in ‘the “Headmistress quarters”’. A little over a week after that, she had ‘collapsed’ with bronchitis and influenza and was confined to the MOI rest room. Hamilton was well enough to present herself for her first scheduled day as a member of the Reconstruction Secretariat, but within hours she was writing in her diary in her new ‘real old fashioned dignified government office room’ that, again, ‘it is not very clear to me what I am going to be doing’. While she had started a new, blank notebook on her first day at the MOI (poignantly adding her life insurance number to the inside front cover), she took the volume of her diary beginning in October 1940 with her to the War Cabinet offices and continued to write until she filled it. Carrying the diary allowed her earlier memories of feeling ‘baffled and pointless’ as a ‘temp.’ to intrude on her thoughts. ‘I shall have to write my reminiscences here’, she decided on the first anniversary of her appointment, reminding herself ‘that a sense of frustration is likely to go on and the change over from a responsible admin. job to an “intelligence” one is not likely to be pleasant’.¹⁰⁸

Over the next three years, Hamilton’s diary entries become more fleeting as she immersed herself in her work and her memoirs, recording the names of colleagues with whom she had had intense conversations; fact-finding missions to colleges and hospitals; and the progress of a range of committees on the problems of the post-war settlement. She was appointed to serve officially on bodies including the Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services, and when she wrote about her war service in her second memoir she emphasized the opportunities she had had there to work as part of a collective, even, or especially, if this meant her work becoming subsumed into a larger whole. She would later write that she had particularly admired the ‘higher civil servants’ working on the Beveridge Report for their ‘entire objectivity and selfless readiness to put all they had into a common pool of a range of extremely able individuals’.¹⁰⁹ As the only member of the social insurance committee with a public reputation, Hamilton may have underestimated how much William Beveridge valued her opinions and expertise, especially on women’s issues, as his biographer suggests.¹¹⁰ Her diaries also reveal that she retained a tight-knit web of social and professional connections with favoured colleagues at the MOI throughout the war, continuing to hear details about their office intrigues and acting as a sounding board for their ideas. On a hot evening in the summer of 1941, for example, she had taken a taxi through the City with Kenneth and Jane Clark and Henry Moore to see ‘the tremendous, really awe-inspiring ruins’, ending up on the balcony of a pub in Wapping discussing painting.¹¹¹

In the final months of revising her memoir for publication in 1944, Hamilton continued to ‘re-read’ her diary, reflecting on her struggle to move the focus away from herself and her faith in the importance of writing her ‘friends’ into her life.¹¹² ‘It is probably part of the whole natural process that the centre of interest should move on to others’, she mused, ‘but that movement can only be satisfactory and unharmful to the others if they, like oneself, have value in relation to something more lasting and fundamental than any of us.’ It was her long-term companion, fellow Newnhamite and Chelsea neighbour Dorothy Shuckburgh, who, Hamilton decided in her diary, best embodied this value.¹¹³ Dorothy had lived with Molly at the Adelphi and had stayed close to her throughout the war, working as second librarian to the Board of Education in its central London premises.¹¹⁴ Once, the two women had drunk sherry with each other in the street during an air raid as they watched ‘the fire brigade at work amid the roar overhead’.¹¹⁵ This was the professional friendship, Hamilton declared in her memoir, that had ‘counted most and most constantly and who is so enwound in my life at all its stages that there is something almost unnatural in the attempt to detach and put her down at one particular point’.¹¹⁶

Conclusion

Perhaps fittingly for a professional biographer who devoted several years of her writing career to the work of connecting her ‘concealed autobiography’ to the lives of her friends and colleagues, the first set of Mary Agnes Hamilton’s personal papers arrived at the Churchill Archives Centre (CAC) in a collection of materials assembled by the biographer of one of her contemporaries. As an author, politician, civil servant and political theorist, Lord Arthur Salter (1881–1975) had assembled an extensive private political archive but, in a cruel twist of fate, his papers were inadvertently destroyed while in storage after his death. His biographer undertook to record the personal recollections of those who had worked with him and acquire surviving documents relating to his life, and Hamilton’s war diaries were initially preserved and transcribed as part of this initiative before the archive was transferred to CAC.¹¹⁷ As an author, politician, civil servant and political theorist, Molly Hamilton was one of a great many early professional women who appeared never to have considered that their papers might constitute a private political archive. Her family kindly formalized the donation of her diaries in 2018, adding copies of her obituaries and a scrapbook containing personal materials Hamilton had collected during her lifetime. These include press cuttings, notes and memoranda, her titular degree certificates, printed copies of her speeches and photographs, all meticulously arranged by her niece and nephew to show the different aspects of her work and interests. The significance of this collection, beyond its value as a source on Salter’s life, was immediately recognized, and the papers have now been conserved and catalogued in their own right.¹¹⁸ This means that the archive now has its own reference code and a dedicated hierarchical catalogue record containing a biographical description of Hamilton, its ‘creator’, in the style of a broadsheet obituary or Who’s Who entry. She became only the third woman MP, after Florence Horsbrugh (1889–1969) and Margaret Thatcher (1929–2013), to receive a collection of her own, alongside over 600 male politicians, diplomats, military leaders and journalists whose personal papers reside at CAC.

This chapter has examined the intricacies of the relationship between archival creation and autobiography in the writings of a professional woman who found in later life that ‘the interest of work and the pleasure of companionship’ went hand in hand.¹¹⁹ It has suggested that we can incorporate studies of work, friendship and professional identity into histories of ageing and memory in modern Britain. It also suggests that we need more sophisticated ways of conceptualizing women’s professional careers, ways which can situate the evidence of their individual struggles and achievements not just within singular collection records and narratives of ‘composure’ but within wider networks of influence and association.¹²⁰ We also need to take into account multiple moments of cultural production and their materialities, from the point the ink of a fountain pen dries on the page of a pocket diary or the arrangement of treasured family newspaper cuttings in a scrapbook to their virtual afterlives in online finding aids, as ‘social and collaborative’ documents.¹²¹ Hamilton’s unpublished diaries give us a glimpse of how a ‘distressingly diversified’ and often precarious career in public service could be defined through conversations, committee meetings and chance encounters which eluded conventional forms of archival preservation. Her personal papers survived in the form of an ‘archive’ almost by accident, collected as a mere source on the life of a more powerful male civil servant and their mutual acquaintances.¹²²

‘Professional woman’ may no longer be a contradiction in terms, as it was for much of Hamilton’s career, but we have historically lacked the vocabulary to describe women who interested themselves in different fields of expertise, or those who worked at the intersections of different fields and acted as important conduits for the passage of ideas and social connections between them. Professional detours are highly gendered, often being seen to diminish rather than enhance a woman’s career; Hamilton would publish her last memoir, in which she described herself as a ‘Jack of all trades’, a decade before the term ‘Renaissance woman’ came into popular usage in Britain.¹²³ The gaps in the vocabulary used to talk about professionals of Hamilton’s generation are not simply linguistic, however. They have been influenced by complex histories of record-keeping, biographical research and collection development which often mean that a woman’s public status during her lifetime does not guarantee her papers will be turned into the prestigious form of a private archive. When studying how interior lives interacted with world affairs in this period it is crucial, therefore, to attend to the wider archival politics which shape the very nature of the ‘personal’ and its paper afterlives in different contexts.¹²⁴ In the search for the making of the modern self, historians have largely tended not to dwell on the multitude of different hands through which unpublished testimonies can pass before they reach the reading room desk, nor upon the structures of power and feeling which compose institutions and their collections over time. But the gendered histories of record-keeping practices and mentalities can alter the nature of the relationship between public and private lives, ultimately determining who we see as professional and how their contributions are remembered.