British Classics Outside England: The Academy and Beyond

3: Kathleen Freeman: An Apostle and Evangelist for Classical Greece

49 iEleanor Irwin Kathleen Freeman An Apostle and Evangelist for Classical Greece Chapter 3 Kathleen Freeman was an unusual classicist in early twentieth-century Britain,1 not only because she was a woman, but also because she was not interested simply in the undergraduate who came fresh from school with the ability to read Latin and Greek, but wanted to introduce the ancient Greek world to those who had not previously learned Greek.2 To this end she translated Greek authors and interpreted ancient values, at first for university undergraduates, but later also for a reading public hungry for ideas. She was admired as an inspirational teacher but ignored (and even despised) for her lively translations and her interest in practical questions of topography and criminal investigation.3 The reference in the title of this chapter, “apostle and evangelist,” attempts to capture her activities outside the university and her zeal in presenting the ancient Greek world. During the Second World War, while she still held her university post, she found new students and a new audience in the armed forces and in readers of the Western Mail. After the end of the war, she resigned from the university (though she was not yet fifty years old) and continued to write, now for ordinary people outside the university, not only providing the kind of help they needed to under- 50 Eleanor Irwin stand but also inviting them to engage with ideas through acquaintance with ancient Greece. Her translations of the pre-Socratic philosophers and her study of the Greek city states continue to be consulted and still appear on university reading lists. Freeman was convinced that the ancient Greeks had important lessons for modern society in addressing problems, whether in the administration of justice, resistance to tyranny, or the causes of crime; and she communicated these ideas with the enthusiasm of an evangelist. Through the Philosophical Society of England she helped to launch a scheme, albeit short-lived, for adult education and independent study, developing a reading list and serving for two or more years as Director of Studies. In all her writing—whether in newspaper columns, articles, translations, or studies of ancient society—she never ceased to believe that the Greeks were worth knowing. Kathleen Freeman4 graduated (B.A. 1918, M.A. 1922) from the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, now Cardiff University, and was awarded a D.Litt. in 1940 for The Work and Life of Solon and six articles.5 She remained at Cardiff as a lecturer in Greek for twenty-seven years from 1919 to 1946. During these years she also published poetry, short stories, novels, and mystery stories in addition to her classical research and lecturing. In 1923 her earliest classical article, “The Dramatic Technique of the Oedipus Coloneus,” appeared and in the following year (1924) three sonnets “Friendship” in Adelphi, and “Candour ” and “Liberation” in The Golden Hind. Nineteen twenty-six was a year of unusual productivity with a book of short stories, The Intruder and Other Stories; a novel, Martin Hanner, A Comedy; and The Work and Life of Solon.6 Between 1928 and 1936 she experimented with different styles of fiction in four novels7 and in 1936 invented a new persona, Mary Fitt, under whose pseudonym she was to write twenty-seven mystery novels and many short stories. From 1936 she separated the classicist (Kathleen Freeman) from the writer of fiction (Mary Fitt), a separation that she guarded with some mischievous pleasure until the 1950s.8 The apparent exceptions to this division of output were Gown and Shroud (1947), a novel in which clay tablets in an unknown “Xanthian” language were at the heart of the mystery,9 and three short stories based on court cases in the Attic orators (1950, 1951), all of which she published as Kathleen Freeman because of the specialized classical Greek knowledge displayed. As Mary Fitt she was elected to the Detection Club in 1950 and invited to become a member of the Society of Authors in March 1948, six months after she had joined as Kathleen Freeman.10 Once the identity of Mary Fitt became known, the name was sometimes corrupted to Miss Fitt Kathleen Freeman 51 (= misfit), with a hint of her eccentricity and her (unconventional) friendship with Dr. Liliane Clopet. Of Mary Fitt, Freeman wrote enigmatically: “in my character as Author I was born some years later than Myself, in...