Mary Agnes Hamilton

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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.
Black and white, head-and-shoulders photograph of Mary Agnes Hamilton, taken from the side but turning her face to the camera. Her blouse or jacket looks silky; her dark hair is in coils over her ears.

Connections

Connections 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
Hamilton reported that her friend was...
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
She was an occasional visitor at the Morrells'...
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
Chosen by Royde-Smith as a...
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
Her reputation has been first and foremost the political one which she shared with Sidney: as...

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