Opinion
Helen Waddell
Ulster History Circle
Helen Waddell was born in Tokyo where her father was a Presbyterian missionary on 31 May 1889.
The family returned to Ulster in 1900 and Helen was educated at Victoria College, Belfast, Queen’s College, Belfast, and later Somerville College, Oxford. Her first book was Lyrics from the Chinese, but her best known works are The Wandering Scholars (1927), The Desert Fathers (1936) and Mediaeval Latin Lyrics (1929), and she translated from Latin Beasts and Saints. Her first play, The Spoilt Buddha, was performed at the Opera House, Belfast by the Ulster Literary Society, and in 1935 The Abbé Prevost was staged.
She is best remembered for the novel Peter Abelard (1933). It has been translated into many languages and has run to over thirty editions. In 1949 she published Stories from Holy Writ.
She contributed many articles to the Standard, Manchester Guardian and The Nation and was engaged in lecturing and broadcasting. She was assistant editor of the magazine The Nineteenth Century.
Among her friends in London, where she was Vice-President of the Irish Literary Society, were W. B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Rose Macaulay, Siegfried Sassoon, Max Beerbohm and George Russell. She received honorary degrees from Columbia, Belfast, Durham and St Andrew’s Universities and is the only woman to have won the A. C. Benson Medal of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1950 she developed a wasting neurological illness which put an end to her writing and she spent her last years in the care of her sister. She died on 5 March 1965 in London and was buried in Magherally churchyard, County Down.
