Mary Agnes Hamilton
-
Standard Name: Hamilton, Mary Agnes
Birth Name: Mary Agnes Adamson
Nickname: Molly
Married Name: Mary Agnes Hamilton
Pseudonym: Iconoclast
MAH
published during the first half of the twentieth century, writing to support herself after a disastrous marriage and during a distinguished career in politics and the civil service. Many of her novels provide fictional treatments of topics that concerned her in public life: political charisma, pacifism, women's access to political activity. Her non-fiction includes books of history and geography, political analyses of the Labour Party
the Trade Unions, and life-writing, most notably two successive volumes of autobiography, and the biographies of politicians including women who deserve to be better known for their activism. She calls her book about Newnham College
a biography as well.
Connections
Connections Sort descending | Author name | Excerpt |
---|---|---|
death | Ray Strachey | The month before this she had quite calmly told Mary Agnes Hamilton
that she had to have an operation that might prove a very big one. She then expected at most to be off work... |
Friends, Associates | Naomi Royde-Smith | NRS
was a close friend of Rose Macaulay
, with whom in the immediate postwar period she shared entertaining duties at her flat, in something similar to a salon. They apparently met through Macaulay contributing... |
Friends, Associates | Evelyn Sharp | Their many shared friends included Vera Brittain
, Winifred Holtby
, and the writer and politician Mary Agnes Hamilton
. In 1940 Hamilton took Harry Gill
, president of the Railway Clerks' Association
and a... |
Friends, Associates | Phyllis Bentley | At the Ministry of InformationPB
worked with politician and writer Mary Agnes Hamilton
, who admired Bentley's superb warmth and strength of feeling, but felt them to be a drawback for this kind of... |
Friends, Associates | E. M. Delafield | EMD
had many literary friends, some of whom were associated with Time and Tide magazine, including Lady Rhondda, Winifred Holtby
, L. A. G. Strong
, A. B. Cox
, Mary Agnes Hamilton
, and... |
Friends, Associates | Ray Strachey | RS
got to know Mary Agnes Hamilton
in 1930, through giving evidence to the Royal Commission on the Civil Service, on which Hamilton served. Casual contact over shared suffrage work had not made them friends... |
Friends, Associates | Marie Belloc Lowndes | A younger friend, Mary Agnes Hamilton
, used to dine with MBL
during the interwar years: early because Lowndes liked to begin writing as early as 5 a.m. Hamilton, Mary Agnes. Remembering My Good Friends. Jonathan Cape, 1944. 296 |
Friends, Associates | Lady Margaret Sackville | LMS
became, according to Mary Agnes Hamilton
, one of those [e]verybody who was anybody in the anti-war movement, who gathered around Lady Ottoline Morrell
. Hamilton, Mary Agnes. Remembering My Good Friends. Jonathan Cape, 1944. 78 |
Friends, Associates | Rose Macaulay | In 1921 RM
was spending several nights a week in a room she rented in the large house of writer Naomi Royde-Smith
at 44 Prince's Gardens, Kensington. Emery, Jane. Rose Macaulay: A Writer’s Life. John Murray, 1991. 191 Babington Smith, Constance. Rose Macaulay. Collins, 1972. 100 |
Intertextuality and Influence | Laurence Hope | In addition to adaptations of her poetry for music, two films adapted Hope's work: Less than the Dust (1916, with Mary Pickford
and David Powell
) and The Indian Love Lyrics (1923). Less than the... |
Literary responses | Naomi Royde-Smith | Mary Agnes Hamilton
later called the Problems page unique both in the ingenuity and standard of its competitions and in the calibre of the persons who felt it worth while to go in for them... |
Literary responses | Rose Allatini | Meanwhile the Times Literary Supplement saw the novel as well-written—evidently the work of a woman. The reviewer judged that as a frank and sympathetic study of certain types of mind and character, it is of... |
Literary responses | Vernon Lee | One of the first and most appreciative readers of VL
's work was John Addington Symonds
, a leading cultural historian of the time. Her book also brought her the notice and friendship of other... |
Literary responses | Beatrice Webb | Mary Agnes Hamilton
later commented on the uncharacteristic lyricism of this book. Although it was hard to read, it was, she said, hungrily read. BW
herself was delighted to meet a taxi driver who... |
Literary responses | Beatrice Webb | H. G. Wells
caricatured her (along with Sidney, of course) in The New Machiavelli as Altiora Bailey. Briggs, Julia. A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit, 1858-1924. Hutchinson, 1987. 315 |
Timeline
14 December 1918
The post-war general election (sometimes called the coupon election) was the first in which some British women (those over thirty with a property qualification of their own or their husband's) voted.
26 December 1918
US President Woodrow Wilson
(who had already been in Paris in connection with the peace conference which did not officially convene until 18 January following) was received in London with intense enthusiasm.
Summer 1919
John Maynard Keynes
published The Economic Consequences of the Peace.
30 May 1929
Labour
came in twenty-six votes ahead of the Conservatives
in the first general election with full women's suffrage: the prospect of voting by women under thirty brought the demeaning nickname of the Flapper Election....
19 September 1931
The Japanese invasion of Manchuria began, signalling a shift of the balance of power from the Emperor to the escalating military machine.
30 July 1932
The Independent Labour Party
, increasingly disillusioned with the Labour Party
's movement towards the centre, took a decision to disaffiliate from its own larger and more successful offspring.
14 November 1935
A general election was held in Britain. The Conservative Party
polled most votes, and the National Coalition government was returned to power.
29 September 1938
The Munich Pact (associated with the name of Neville Chamberlain
, who travelled to Munich to sign it for Britain) granted the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Hitler
's Germany.
19 May 1940
Winston Churchill
made his first BBC
radio broadcast as wartime coalition Prime Minister.
August 1940
A Ministry of Information
pamphlet appeared under the title Loss of Eden. A Cautionary Tale. Re-issued in 1941 more openly called If Hitler
Comes, it dealt with the possible scenario of successful Nazi