Tag: Virginia Woolf

Laughter in the library: F.M. Mayor at Cambridge

3 Comments

I’m delighted that my piece on F.M. Mayor’s unforgettable novel The Rector’s Daughter (1924) has just been published in the latest edition of Slightly Foxed (Spring 2023, issue 77: ‘Laughter in the library’). I loved thinking about how happy and free the young Flora Mayor felt, studying at Newnham College in the early 1890s, acting in the college dramatic society and learning how to ride a bicycle. Her life after Cambridge did not fulfil her hopes and ambitions, but the love of her twin sister Alice helped to give her the strength to keep working on what would become a twentieth-century masterpiece.

I wrote a previous blogpost about this wonderful book, ‘FM Mayor’s The Rector’s Daughter’, and the Slightly Foxed editors have kindly given me permission to reproduce my new essay below.

Out of the Shadows

Take two sisters, Alice and Flora Mayor, identical twins born into a comfortable upper-middle-class family in Surrey in 1872. Their clergyman father was also a professor of classical literature at King’s College, London, and their mother Jessie a talented musician and linguist. As members of a Victorian clerical family, the girls had certain duties (‘Church as depressing as usual. 2 and a half people there,’ young Flora wrote in her diary), but mostly they and their two older brothers had tremendous fun: performing amateur theatricals, skating and playing tennis, singing, writing stories, going to the theatre, and always, always reading: Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and Mrs Gaskell.

Some of their parents’ intellectual interests must have rubbed off though, because at 20, Flora decided to study history at Newnham College, Cambridge. She hated to leave Alice behind, but the sisters wrote to each other every day, Flora’s letters bursting with news of boating on the river, late-night cocoa parties, debating and drama. A college photograph of her shows a dark-haired young woman with laughing eyes (‘Miss Dant said I’d got a great deal of fun about me’). Alice remained quietly at home, sketching and practising her music, while Flora was having all sorts of new adventures. ‘The bicycle is fascinating,’ she told Alice, ‘it’s much easier than skating – not so tiring. Mounting is a trial and one must have knickerbockers for it.’

In the late 1980s, almost a century after Flora, I became a postgraduate student at Cambridge and bought a second-hand bicycle during my first week. Cycling to the university library every day – in jeans rather than knickerbockers – gave me a delicious sense of freedom. I found a battered green-spined Virago paperback of Flora’s novel The Rector’s Daughter on a market stall and fell in love with it, but I didn’t know much about its author. Tidying my bookshelves recently, I rediscovered my student novel collection, and decided to find out more about her.

Growing up, the Mayor twins were close to ‘the Aunts’, their father’s seven unmarried sisters who lived together in Hampstead. All were energetic, cultivated and useful women, but Flora was determined not to be like them or the sister whom she so closely resembled. After four years at Cambridge, she decided to go on the stage, but it wasn’t the glamorous life she’d envisaged. With mostly nonspeaking parts, little money and endless provincial tours, her health began to suffer. Her ambitions to be a writer seemed to be equally ill-starred. When her collection of stories, Mrs Hammond’s Children, was published under her stage name ‘Mary Strafford’ in 1901, the critics were decidedly lukewarm.

So there would be no standing ovation for Flora/Mary, but there was someone waiting in the wings. Ernest Shepherd, a young architect and close friend of one of her brothers, had been in love with her for years. After he was offered a post in the Architectural Survey of India, he travelled to Flora’s cheap lodgings in Macclesfield to propose. She said yes, rather to her own surprise. ‘Being kissed is so odd,’ she told Alice. Ernest left for India, and six months of letters followed, discussing the date of their wedding and their plans for the future.

When the telegram came with the devastating news that Ernest had died of malaria, Flora broke down. At 32, her dreams of a life as an actress and as a cherished wife and mother were over. She poured her feelings into a ‘Grief Journal’ that she signed Flora Shepherd, the name she would now never have. Writing – and Alice’s loving care – were to save her.

Flora’s masterpiece, The Rector’s Daughter, was published under the authorship of F. M. Mayor by the Hogarth Press in 1924. It’s a short, quietly humorous and deeply perceptive novel that’s as good as anything George Eliot ever wrote. Set in the fictional village of Dedmayne, ‘on the way to nowhere’ in the eastern counties, most of the action, such as it is, takes place at the Rectory, where the clocks seem to have stopped around 1895. The Rector, Canon Jocelyn, is an octogenarian clergyman whose dignified bearing and ‘severe, satirical, and melancholy’ eyes make him a striking figure. By contrast, his 35-year-old daughter Mary is described as ‘a decline’.

Her uninteresting hair, dragged severely back, displayed a forehead lined too early. Her complexion was a dullish hue, not much lighter than her hair. She had her father’s beautiful eyes, and hid them with glasses.

Dowdy Mary Jocelyn seems nothing like vivacious Flora Mayor, but they have a similar intellectual heritage. ‘Books streamed everywhere, all over the house, even up the attic stairs’ of the Rectory, but ‘not more than three Miltons, because of undesirable views on kings, liberty and divorce’. Canon Jocelyn has a sharp, inquiring mind but his daughter is a puzzle to him, and he fails to grasp her aching need for love. For a time, her older, disabled sister Ruth provides this, but after she dies, only Cook (‘a working woman of sixty-three’) shows Mary any affection. Novels offer her some solace during the long winter months: Trollope, Charlotte M. Yonge and Jane Austen are ‘friends so dear and familiar that they peopled her loneliness’.

Mary has a secret that she does not share with her father or Cook: she writes stories and poetry. By chance, she is introduced to the well-connected Brynhilda, whose poet friend Dermott is enthusiastic about Mary’s writing. ‘I have never known anyone on such intimate terms with toads,’ he writes, ‘and this, coupled with a passion for Mother Julian of Norwich, indicates a mind I want to know more of.’ Mary, daringly, agrees to visit Brynhilda’s bohemian London flat 79 Out of the Shadows and at first enjoys its relaxed atmosphere. ‘There was no snapping, fussiness or anxiety. Mary remembered many throes at the Rectory: if the cat took the day off in the woods, if a member of the household was late.’ But after a miserable soirée among the fashionable literary set (‘it was a tribute to Brynhilda that it should come to such a wrong part of London as Kensington’), Mary realizes that she is little more than an object of curiosity to these bright young things, and she returns with relief to decaying Dedmayne. ‘On the whole she was happy. She did not question the destiny life brought her. People spoke pityingly of her, but she did not feel she required pity.’

Like a bright-eyed toad in its shadowy habitat, Mary is content to hide herself away. Then Robert Herbert, a middle-aged clergyman from a neighbouring parish, comes to call. Like Canon Jocelyn, he is a well-read Cambridge graduate, and the two men get on famously, discussing the Greek testament and seventeenth-century folios. Mr Herbert and Mary establish a tentative friendship too, but neither is romantically inclined, or so they tell themselves. One wintry day, as they take their usual walk together in the Rectory garden, everything changes.

The equinoctial wind rushed through the branches of the old elms and roared like the sea. It gave a colour to Mary’s cheeks; her eyes dilated and brightened; the spirit that sometimes showed itself in her writings looked forth. Mr Herbert saw her eyes.

It’s a charged encounter that neither of them will ever forget, but like the wind that changes direction unexpectedly, things don’t go according to plan.

When The Rector’s Daughter was first published, it was widely praised by critics who traced its lineage to the writers whom Mayor loved: Jane Austen, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell. ‘It is like a bitter Cranford,’ wrote Sylvia Lynd. The public loved it too, and Boots Library had to restrict its lending rules due to the novel’s overwhelming popularity. In 1925 The Rector’s Daughter was shortlisted for the Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse, an annual literary prize in the interwar years for a work ‘calculated to reveal to French readers the true spirit and character of England’. E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India won it that year, but Mayor’s consolation prize was an admiring letter Forster wrote to her that begins ‘This is Dedmayne, plus better scenery’ (he was staying at his unmarried aunt’s house on the Isle of Wight at the time). ‘Mary begins as ridiculous and ends as dignified,’ he told her, ‘this seems to me a very great achievement.’

I like to picture the young Flora Mayor in Cambridge, cycling by the river and dreaming of the adventures that lay ahead of her. Life didn’t bring the excitement she wanted, but she found a lasting contentment in her writing, and in sharing a home with her twin. Flora died of pneumonia in 1932 at the age of 59; Alice, who cared for her sister and made it possible for her to write, lived until 1960. F. M. Mayor’s small output of novels, including The Third Miss Symons (1913) and The Squire’s Daughter (1929), soon fell out of print, but those who read The Rector’s Daughter never forgot it. In 1941, amidst the London Blitz, the novelist Rosamond Lehmann paid tribute to Mary Jocelyn as ‘my favourite character in contemporary fiction’, and in 1967 Leonard Woolf described the novel as ‘remarkable’ in the fourth volume of his autobiography, Downhill All the Way. Encouraged by this, Flora’s niece Teresa (Lady Rothschild) asked her brother Andreas Mayor to approach Penguin Books, and The Rector’s Daughter appeared as a Penguin Modern Classic in 1973. It became a Virago Modern Classic in 1987 and has recently been reissued by Persephone Books with a foreword by Alice and Flora’s great-niece, Victoria Gray. It seems somehow right that it was Flora Mayor’s nephew and niece, remembering their writer aunt, who helped to bring her extraordinary, understated novel out from the shadows.

ANN KENNEDY SMITH is writing a book about Cambridge women. She still lives in the city, and cycles by the river most days.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 77 © Ann Kennedy Smith 2023

A Cambridge photographer

5 Comments
Portrait of Lettice Ramsey by PAL Brunney, c.1970 (J Brunney family photographs)

The Cambridge photographer Lettice Ramsey (1898-1985) was, along with her photographic partner Helen Muspratt (1907-2001), one of the leading women photographers of the twentieth century. The women’s creative partnership began when they opened their first studio in Cambridge in 1932, and their joint business expanded to Oxford after Muspratt moved there following her marriage in 1937. After that they continued to run their two studios in Cambridge and Oxford until the late 1970s, and kept the name of their shared business (with its efficient ampersand) for both: Ramsey & Muspratt.

In 1987 Lettice Ramsey’s daughter Jane Burch donated many Ramsey & Muspratt portraits to the National Portrait Gallery in London, and in 2012 the NPG put on an exhibition about Ramsey’s friendship with Virginia Woolf’s nephew Julian Bell, ‘The Bloomsbury Poet and Cambridge Photographer.’ Lettice Ramsey’s portraits of Virginia Woolf, the ‘Cambridge Spies’ and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes are reproduced all over the world, yet she herself remains comparatively unknown.

Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries have recently secured Helen Muspratt’s photographic archive, and in 2021 put on a wonderful exhibition of her work (still available online): ‘Helen Muspratt Photographer’. As Bodley’s Librarian Richard Ovenden comments in the accompanying video, by doing this they ‘put a flag in the sand’, to say that the history of photography, and Oxford University, needs to take Helen Muspratt’s photographic work seriously. Lettice Ramsey’s contribution to their lifelong professional partnership was downplayed in the Oxford exhibition: in the exhibition’s video, she is described as a sociable Cambridge widow ‘who needed something to do’. Yet Lettice Ramsey was a creative artist with a work ethic and brilliance that matched Muspratt’s, and she continued to work professionally almost until her death in 1985.

Dorothy Hodgkin, by Ramsey & Muspratt, bromide print, circa 1937; NPG P363(13)

The Oxford exhibition downplays the important studio and developing room work that the women did collaboratively in Cambridge in the 1930s before they continued their work separately in both university cities from 1937 onwards. The fact that they worked so closely together on all aspects of their early photography is significant. It’s impossible to say which of the two women took their experimental solarised photographs (see NPG website here), as well as the portrait of Nobel prizewinner Dorothy Hodgkin above, because all of their portraits of the time were signed democratically as Ramsey & Muspratt. Both women considered their work in the darkroom to be as important a part of their artistic process as what they did behind the camera; and both women should now be celebrated as the groundbreaking photographers and creative partnership that they were.

The original glass plates and prints that Ramsey stored in her Post Office Terrace studio remain in private ownership and many are held by the Cambridgeshire Collection. It would be wonderful if Cambridge’s University Library secured this unique archive for the nation, as it did with the Stephen Hawking archive recently. Then the great twentieth-century photographer Lettice Ramsey might at last be given the recognition that she deserves.

© Ann Kennedy Smith 2021, all rights reserved

1915 portrait of Lettice Ramsey (née Baker) by Frances Baker © Newnham College, reproduced with kind permission of Newnham College.

See also my previous blogposts ‘Woman with a camera: Lettice Ramsey (1898-1985)) and ‘The Wedding Photos: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and Lettice Ramsey’, Parts 1 and 2. My own interest in the Ramsey & Muspratt business was sparked by seeing their luminous portrait of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (Ramsey photographed her in Cambridge before Hodgkin took up her academic appointment at Oxford), displayed side by side with Frances Baker’s 1915 painting of Lettice Ramsey (see above) in the Cambridge University Library as part of their ‘The Rising Tide: Women at Cambridge’ exhibition of 2019-20. The painting is permanently held in Newnham College’s collection.

Voyaging Out (2)

2 Comments

The second of my occasional blogposts focusing on book news, reviews and literary events.

The Tavistock Clinic’s original location, in Bloomsbury’s Tavistock Square
  1. Mental health This September marks 100 years since the Tavistock Clinic first opened its doors in London (now part of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust). It was founded by Dr Hugh Crichton-Miller, who wanted ordinary civilians to have access to the pioneering ‘talking therapies’ that had been used so successfully to treat shell-shocked soldiers during World War One. In Cambridge a similar clinic was already treating voluntary outpatients at the old Addenbrooke’s Hospital. It was founded by ‘Ladies Dining Society’ member Ida Darwin, with the support of C.S. Myers and W.H.R. Rivers. Dr Helen Boyle had been providing free counselling to women and children in Brighton since 1905. You can read more about these mental health pioneers in my article ‘The Lessons of Shell Shock’ which appears in the new issue of History Today.

2. Book news: This week, on 3 September, over 600 books will be published on a single day, the first of several waves of new books appearing in October and November. The Covid-19 crisis has meant that many of the larger publishers delayed publication of their ‘big name’ authors until the autumn. Smaller publishers are worried that their authors will be overlooked, because they don’t have the money to fund publicity campaigns and host book launches. The former Booker judge Alex Clark has written about this autumn’s ‘bookalanche’. One of the books I am looking forward to reading is Richard Ovenden’s Burning The Books (John Murray Press). It’s about the deliberate obliteration of libraries and archives over three millennia, and is already getting lots of great reviews. Ovenden is Bodley’s Librarian at Oxford, and his aim is not just to write about the destruction of precious archives,  ‘but also to acknowledge and celebrate the ways librarians and archivists have fought back’, he writes.

3. Pen names Some much-loved books were also in the news this month when the ‘Reclaim Her Name’ venture  was launched to mark 25 years of the Women’s Prize for Fiction. The Prize’s sponsor Bailey’s has re-released 25 books that were written by women but originally published under male pseudonyms. The collection is free to download in e-book form, and physical box sets will be donated to selected UK libraries. The idea is to introduce readers to more international female authors, and allow women to reclaim their rightful place in literary history: ‘it’s as if women didn’t write any of these books, that the past is an unbroken line of beards and every now and again, you get one woman’ the Prize’s co-founder and honorary director Kate Mosse said.

While it’s good that women writers’ contributions are being recognized, some questions remain unanswered.  The collection includes Middlemarch by Mary Ann Evans (aka George Eliot) and Amantine by Aurore Dupin (better known as the best-selling French writer George Sand). Along with Charlotte Brontë, Eliot and Sand are described by Virginia Woolf in her book-length essay A Room of One’s Own as “all victims of inner strife as their writings prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man.”  However, as many commentators have pointed out, George Eliot and George Sand liked their professional pseudonyms and continued to use them long after everyone knew they were women. The Bailey’s venture has been criticized for a well-meaning but clumsy attempt to impose birth names – or, indeed, married names- on professional writers who in some cases were happy to leave them behind.  It might be more useful to highlight the novels of many women writers whose work has been forgotten, some of their books gathering dust in libraries.

4. Library news It’s very good news that the UK’s museums and libraries gradually began to reopen this month.  As I wrote in my previous blog, over the past months Cambridge University Library staff have been working hard to make many more collections available digitally. From today, 31 August 2020, many more people around the world will be able to access the Library’s treasures via the ‘Google Arts and Culture’ platform, which uses high-resolution image technology to allow users to explore the collections of many different galleries and museums (more information here). More objects will be added in the coming months, and it’s expected that the Fitzwilliam Museum will join the platform along with other University of Cambridge institutions. You can follow the link here to virtually tour the Library’s objects and treasures on the platform. Don’t forget to click on the ‘heart’ sign to give valuable feedback on the collection.

5. Reading recommendations (fiction) As a former dictionary writer myself (see my Slightly Foxed essay here) I have enjoyed reading Eley Williams’s The Liars’ Dictionary this summer. It’s a funny and original novel that follows the intertwining stories of two lexicographers connected to the fictional ‘Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary’ 100 years apart: Peter Winceworth, who in 1899 begins to smuggle his own made-up words into the dictionary, and Mallory, the young woman employed to create a digitised version of the dictionary who tries to track down the false entries and solve the mystery. Despite their ability with words, each of the two characters struggles with speaking their mind, and the book is a playful investigation of the limits of language and the importance of love.

(nonfiction) If you are missing libraries as I am, you will enjoy photographer Sara Rawlinson’s newly published book Illuminating Cambridge Libraries. I previously mentioned her following in the footsteps of the photographer Lettice Ramsey who climbed King’s College Chapel’s scaffolding when she was in her 70s to photograph the ceiling. Rawlinson did the same from the precarious platform of a cherry-picker, and now her fascinating book captures the look and feel of different Cambridge libraries.

In ‘North-west London blues’ her 2012 essay for the New York Review of Books, the writer Zadie Smith described how after she moved to New York to teach creative writing, the library became an important place for her to work. ‘Each morning I struggle to find a seat in the packed university library,’ she writes, ‘despite the fact that every single student in here could be at home in front of their Macbook browsing Google Books.’ It’s unlikely that libraries will be packed for a while, but it’s very good that they are opening their doors again as the autumn begins.

© Ann Kennedy Smith 31 August 2020 (all rights reserved)

Voyaging Out (or staying in)

4 Comments

‘She was like her mother, as the image in a pool on a still summer’s day is like the vivid flushed face that hangs over it.’ (Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out, 1915)


Vanessa Bell, The Other Room, late 1930s, 161 x 174 cm, Private Collection, © The Estate of Vanessa Bell. Courtesy of Henrietta Garnett.

A summer blogpost about a handful of news and events that I hope will be of interest.

1. Literature events: On 15 August Literature Cambridge is running an online study session, taught by Alison Hennegan, exploring Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out. There will be insights into ‘the struggles of one young woman to attain self-knowledge, independence of thought and action’ in Woolf’s depiction of Rachel Vinrace. The novel also introduces the first glimpse of Clarissa Dalloway, who would become the subject of Mrs Dalloway ten years later. (“I’d give ten years of my life to know Greek,” she thinks, wishing women had access to the classics in the way that Cambridge male students had). You can read more about Literature Cambridge’s 2020-21 ‘Virginia Woolf Season’, based on her twelve major books, here.

2. TV: Mrs America is a new nine-part historical drama series currently being shown on BBC2 (available on BBC iplayer). It tells the story of the 1970s campaign to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment across different American states, and highlights the personal and political clashes between the leading ‘second-wave’ feminists (who include Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan) and the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly. In a recent article in the L.A. Times Steinem criticizes Mrs America for paying too much attention to her right-wing adversary Schafly (played with great aplomb by Cate Blanchett), and concludes ‘“Mrs. America” has described deck chairs on the Titanic but lied about why the Titanic went down.’ However, the drama’s depiction of the politician Shirley Chisholm (played by Uzo Aduba) has been widely praised; she was the first black woman to become elected to Congress and the first black person to run for US president. Mrs America is a thoroughly engaging series, and I found it interesting to compare the different points of view on the women’s cause in the 1970s with Ray Strachey’s 1908 transatlantic trip as an idealistic young British suffragist encountering American feminists for the first time (she was more forceful than they were).

3. Book news: Earlier this month it was announced that, because of Covid-19, The Guardian will cut 180 jobs and lose its Saturday supplements, (Weekend, Review, The Guide, and Travel sections). This has caused dismay among many readers, and a group of editors and journalists who contribute to the supplements have pointed out that ‘Saturday is by far the biggest day of the week for print sales of the Guardian, with a circulation 130% higher than on weekdays.’ It does seem a shame if everything moves online. I was thrilled when my first book review for The Guardian appeared in the print edition of the Saturday Review in April (and online here), so I very much hope the supplements continue into the next decade .

4. Reading recommendations: (nonfiction) Mark Honigsbaum’s overview of a hundred years of epidemic outbreaks, The Pandemic Century (WH Allen) is an excellent and timely book. (I quoted his article in my post on Francis Jenkinson and the ‘Russian’ flu pandemic of the 1890s here.) First published just over a year ago in April 2019, Honigsbaum wrote in the hardback’s epilogue ‘the only thing that is certain is that there will be new plagues and new pandemics. It is not a question of if, but when.’  For the paperback edition he has updated the book with a new epilogue and an extra chapter, ‘Disease X’, bringing us up to date with the ongoing situation. The book’s subtitle has been changed to ‘A History of Global Contagion from the Spanish Flu to Covid-19’.

(Fiction) As a break from the worrying news cycle, and perfect summer holiday reading, I recommend Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham. It’s an alternative history that answers several ‘what-if’ questions: what if Hillary Clinton hadn’t married Bill, and what if she had beaten Trump to the presidency? The Guardian’s Emma Brockes described it as ‘a kind of revenge fantasy for women who sublimate their own ambitions for the sake of their husband’s careers’. It’s the perfect foil to the 1970s world that is depicted so skilfully in Mrs America, and a great beach read.

5. Cambridge culture: For a good excuse to go out, it’s very good news that Kettle’s Yard and the Fitzwilliam Museum are re-opening in August, as are several Cambridge libraries, including Milton Road Library. I recently wrote about the ‘hidden’ wedding photographs that Cambridge photographer Lettice Ramsey took of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, so I’m looking forward to an online talk on 5 August called ‘That was our place: the Cambridge of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes’. It’s by local scholar Di Beddow, and organized by the Friends of Milton Road Library. You can book a free ticket here.  

I hope you are enjoying safe summer days whether you are voyaging out, or staying safely at home.

Ann Kennedy Smith 31 July 2020

Woman with a camera: Lettice Ramsey (1898-1985)

12 Comments

1915 portrait of Lettice Ramsey (née Baker) by Frances Baker © Newnham College, reproduced with kind permission of Newnham College (via Art UK‘s website).

A young woman wearing a red blouse leans against a balcony railing. Her head is tilted and her brown eyes are pensive, and there’s something resolute about her expression.  In the background is a landscape that has become familiar to viewers of last year’s BBC drama series Normal People: the light-filled west of Ireland coastline. As a small child Lettice Ramsey’s English parents moved to Rosses Point estuary in County Sligo where her father Cecil managed an oyster farm. When he died suddenly, her mother Frances Baker took her two young daughters a few miles south to live in the town of Ballysadare. Baker had trained with Gwen Raverat at the Slade School of Fine Art, and she opened a small shop in the town; her paintings were also displayed and sold in exhibitions in Ireland and the UK. She painted this portrait of here seventeen-year-old daughter in 1915, when Lettice was about to travel to England to board at Bedales, the progressive co-educational school in Hampshire, before going on to study at Newnham College, Cambridge.

This beautiful portrait, which now belongs to Newnham, seems to suggest Lettice’s feelings of sadness at leaving her home in Ireland, and her determination to succeed. In 2019 it was extensively restored by conservator Polly Saltmarsh before being displayed at Cambridge University Library as part of its 2019-2020 “Rising Tide” exhibition. The determined-looking girl in the painting studied moral sciences at Newnham from 1918 until 1921, worked in Cambridge University’s first Psychological Laboratory and would later pick up a camera to become, with Oxford’s Helen Muspratt, one of the leading women photographers of the 1930s in their studio partnership, Ramsey & Muspratt.

Yet it’s probably fair to say that these days Lettice Ramsey might be still better known for her famous husband than for her pioneering contribution to portrait photography. Frank Ramsey was the brilliant mathematician, philosopher and economist who, as an eighteen-year-old student at King’s College Cambridge, helped to translate Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus into English in 1921. Lettice (née Baker) was five years older than him and Newnham’s star student when they first met in 1920 at a meeting of the Cambridge Heretics society, where she was Treasurer. Frank gazed at her, too overawed to speak. He wrote in his diary that Miss Baker was “very beautiful and rather nice.”

They began their love affair in 1924, when he was a King’s fellow and she had returned to Cambridge to work at the Psychological Laboratory. They married in August 1925, had two daughters and a relationship that was happy if unconventional (neither believed that love meant exclusivity, and Lettice thought jealousy about sexual matters was reprehensible). Tragically, Frank died of liver disease in 1930, aged just twenty-seven. Cheryl Misak, the author of a new biography Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers (OUP 2020) is convinced that he caught Weil’s disease while swimming in the River Cam in what was an unusually warm October. There’s an excellent discussion about Ramsey’s life and work in this episode of BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking with Shahidha Bari and Cheryl Misak – and it has a delightful recording of Lettice’s voice halfway through.

After Frank’s death, Lettice Ramsey was left to bring up their two daughters alone. In 1932, her then lover Julian Bell invited her to his family home at Charleston in Sussex to meet his parents, Vanessa and Clive Bell. Ramsey brought along her new portable camera and took informal snaps of Virginia Woolf playing with her young niece Angelica Bell in the sunshine; Woolf in turn took a photograph of Lettice standing in her summer dress and one of the distinctive necklaces she often wore, holding what looks like an early Leica camera (see Maggie Humm’s Snapshots of Bloomsbury, 2005). The National Portrait Gallery in London has most of these portraits, and in 2012 put on an exhibition of a selection of them.

On a summer holiday in Dorset with her daughters later in 1932 Lettice met Helen Muspratt, ten years her junior, who owned a small photographic studio in Swanage. It was a life-changing meeting for them both, and may have given Ramsey an idea. Her own mother Frances Baker had earned a living as a single parent in Ireland by selling her paintings; perhaps Ramsey too could support her young family by combining her own artistic and business skills. In her book Face: Shape and Angle (2016), Helen Muspratt’s daughter Jessica Sutcliffe describes how Ramsey, almost on the spur of the moment, asked Muspratt to join her on a new venture. The photographic studio of ‘Ramsey & Muspratt’ (note the ampersand) opened on St Andrews Street in Cambridge later that year. The owner of their main professional rival, Palmer Clark, the town’s photographer since 1867, predicted that “those two ladies won’t last six months.” But Ramsey & Muspratt was so successful that after a couple of years Lettice and Helen bought Palmer Clark’s studio on Post Office Terrace for £600 and established their own premises there.[i]

The two women turned what was little more than a collection of old sheds in an overgrown yard into a purpose-built studio and shop, while the various outhouses were using for developing and printing. Lettice asked her friend Wittgenstein for advice on painting the studio’s woodwork, as he had helped to design his sister’s house in Vienna in 1925. “If it is good paint it white,” he told her. “If it is bad paint it black.” Thanks to his advice, Ramsey and Muspratt’s studio became a stylishly modern space. In 1937 a student journalist in Cambridge’s Granta magazine said it was “like one of René Claire amid Paris rooftops” which reflected Lettice Ramsey’s personal style. “Hers is the photography of originality… She does not need the old-fashioned curtained room, heavy arc lamps and elaborate watch-for-the-dickybird camera.” [ii] There is a rare photograph, probably taken by Helen Muspratt, of Ramsey in the Cambridge studio here.

Ramsey and Muspratt worked as an equal partnership, and as Granta wrote, “They prefer to take people naturally” taking turns to work in the studio and the darkroom. They always signed their portraits democratically as “Ramsey & Muspratt” even after Helen opened her own separate studio in Oxford in 1937. “Helen had the know-how and I had the connections,” Ramsey modestly recalled of her fashionable Bloomsbury set.  Throughout the 1930s many of the undergraduates photographed by Ramsey and Muspratt in Cambridge and Oxford would become very well known: Dorothy Hodgkin who in 1964 won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (she is still the only British woman scientist to be awarded a Nobel) and Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, who would later become infamous as Soviet spies. In 1932 Lettice Ramsey photographed the ‘Apostles‘, including Sir Anthony Blunt. “All intellectuals in Cambridge were Communists at the time”, Ramsey recalled. “We had great hopes, but then were gradually let down.”[iii]

Many of these portraits are now in the National Portrait Gallery’s extensive Ramsey & Muspratt collection, which can be seen here. From the beginning, both women were also keen to push the boundaries of photography as an art form, and were fascinated by Man Ray’s photographic experiments (it seems they were unaware of Lee Miller’s similar work during this period). They discussed solarisation techniques in the studio’s darkroom with their Cambridge scientist friend, J.D. Bernal, and experimented with different styles, as Sutcliffe describes in her book. Their 1935 portrait of Eleanor Singer shows how imaginative their collaboration was (on Peter Loft’s website here).

Ramsey & Muspratt gained an international reputation during this time, and featured regularly in Photography magazine, whose editor praised the duo in 1936 for not following the lucrative route of becoming London society photographers: “Though they are too modest to claim it for themselves, Ramsey & Muspratt hold an important place in photography. For they are forcing the new idea, the modern spirit to the fore”. As Ramsey told him, “We are fortunate in having Cambridge as a field, as we get a lot of young people to photograph: undergraduates, who like experimenting in light and treatment.”[iv]

Helen Muspratt and Lettice Ramsey had a close friendship that lasted a lifetime, across two university cities, that continued long after their professional association ended in 1947. After Muspratt married and settled in Oxford, she was also her family’s main breadwinner, so their experimental photography of the 1930s was abandoned for the “bread and butter” business of wedding and university photography after the war. This might explain why Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes so disliked their 1956 “official” wedding photos taken by Ramsey, which Plath complained resembled “passport shots without imagination or sensitive lighting” (see my blog post here.)

Family photograph of Lettice Ramsey in the 1960s, with kind permission of Stephen Burch. Not to be reproduced without permission.

In the 1960s Lettice Ramsey often returned to the west of Ireland, where this photograph was taken (a rare appearance – she was usually behind the camera, her grandson Stephen Burch recalls). “We had a number of family holidays there in the 1960s, the first of which in 1963 marked the start of my interest in birding” Burch writes. A selection of Ramsey & Muspratt portraits and family photographs, along with other information, features on his website here.

In 1969, at the age of 71, Lettice Ramsey took her camera to Phnom Penn and Siem Reap, unconcerned about the threat of war in Cambodia. When she was forbidden to enter the country as a professional photographer, she simply obtained another passport in which she described herself as a housewife and carried on taking photographs undaunted (“I took hundreds,” she told friends). A year later, she climbed the scaffolding on King’s College Chapel to photograph the stained glass windows, and remained unconcerned when she was accidentally locked in overnight.

Lettice Ramsey reluctantly retired on her 80th birthday in 1978, and sold her Cambridge studio. She had hoped that it would continue as a working studio, her grandson told me, but the next owner’s business was not successful, and he sold the studio and extensive archive of photographic plates to Peter Lofts (who now owns the copyright to almost all Ramsey & Muspratt’s photographs, and kindly permitted me to reproduce Ramsey’s photographs of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes here). In 1978 Helen Muspratt and Lettice Ramsey were photographed separately in their respective Oxford and Cambridge studios by John Lawrence-Jones for a Sunday Times magazine article called ‘The Photographers of Golden Youth’ by Francis Wyndham. This was the first time since the 1930s that their work had been recognized in the national media, and the magazine featured a range of their most famous, and infamous, subjects from the 1930s.

Lettice Ramsey died in 1985, so she did not live to see the recognition belatedly given to Ramsey & Muspratt’s achievements as women photographers: a selection of Helen Muspratt’s photographs were exhibited at Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries in 2020. Their photographs also featured in a Channel 4 programme, ‘Five Women Photographers’ in 1986 when Muspratt’s work featured in a major exhibition at the Bradford Museum of Film and Photography, reassessing the work of 20th-century female photographers, which toured the country for two years. In 2015 the portrait photographer Jane Bown went to Dorset to take Muspratt’s photograph for the Observer. It was a shame, as Jessica Sutcliffe writes, that Lettice Ramsey was not around to enjoy their renewed fame. “She, of all people, would have enjoyed the attention, appreciation, and, most of all, the accompanying parties”.

©Ann Kennedy Smith 3 July 2020 (all rights reserved)

[i] Jessica Sutcliffe Face: Shape and Angle, Helen Muspratt Photographer (Manchester University Press, 2016), p.50.

[ii] Quoted in Sutcliffe, p.50.

[iii] Quoted in Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert Guy Burgess: the spy who knew everyone (2016)

[iv] January 1936: quoted in Sutcliffe, p.63.

SOURCES: My warm thanks to Stephen Burch, Laura Dennis, Maggie Humm, Peter Lofts, Sara Rawlinson and Polly Saltmarsh. Thanks also to my helpful Twitter contacts in tracking down Lettice Ramsey information: Paul Bird @singleaspect; Dr Barbara @adoptanovel; and ArtUK’s Julia Abel Smith @jabelsmith.

Stephen Burch’s website ‘Stephen Burch’s Birding and Dragonfly website’

Peter Lofts’ ‘Lofty Images’ website, with many restored Ramsey & Muspratt prints available for sale

Jan Marsh, ‘ Pioneering photographer who made her mark in naturalistic portraiture and social documentary’. Obituary of Helen Muspratt, Guardian, 11 Aug 2001

Guardian photo essay: ‘Helen Muspratt: the camera of a communist radical’

Jean Mc Nicol ‘All this love business’ London Review of Books, January 2013

Cheryl Misak Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers (OUP 2020) 

“Mrs. Lettice Ramsey.” Obit. The Times (30 July 1985): 12.

Sara Rawlinson, photographer, who last year went on a cherry-picker to take photos of King’s College chapel: see online photography exhibition

Polly Saltmarsh, Saltmarsh Paintings Conservation

Frances Spalding Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury artist (Tauris Parke, 2018)

Charles Saumaurez Smith writes about his family’s Ramsey & Muspratt collection on his blog here

Jessica Sutcliffe Face: Shape and Angle, Helen Muspratt Photographer (Manchester University Press, 2016)