Steely-Eyed Athena: Wilmer Cave Wright and the Advent of Female Classicists

By David Neal Greenwood

This monograph uses the life and work of groundbreaking female classicist Wilmer Cave Wright to examine several questions about the rise of women in that discipline. First, what went into the creation of a classics scholar under circumstances that would seem to preclude that? Second, why was it arguably Wright’s time in Chicago that was her formative experience and period? Third, why did Wright want so desperately to leave Bryn Mawr, and then stay and pour herself into her students? Fourth, through what lens did she approach the evidence of classical literature, and did it make a difference? Fifth, how did Wright survive the Thomas years at Bryn Mawr? Sixth, why did she abruptly abandon her long-term project on Libanius of Antioch? Seventh, what led her to suddenly switch from classical Greek literature to translating medieval Latin medical texts? Wright’s journey from Mason College to Girton College, Cambridge, the University of Chicago, and Bryn Mawr College is placed into historical context. Throughout, the significance of Wright’s work, particularly on the life of the Emperor Julian, is assessed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cambridge Philological Society
• Release date: Jan 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781913701437

David Neal Greenwood

David Neal Greenwood (Ph.D., Edinburgh; FRHistS) is a research fellow at the University of St Andrews, and the author of Julian and Christianity (Cornell University Press).

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The cold, blustering wind, with a suspicion of rain in it, that swept over the campus, under the black, cloud-beset sky, could not chill our ardor, as we stood there, our eyes strained toward Pembroke. Then, through the silence of the night came the first solemn notes of ‘Pallas Athena Thea’, and out of the blackness of the arch gleamed a string of bobbing red lights, like a chain of dancing fireflies.¹

– Theodora Bayes, ‘Lantern Night’

One face in particular leaps out from the surviving photograph of the incoming Girton College students in 1888. Initially, one notices that this woman, conspicuously lacking the fashionably combed-back and piled hair typical of the others, is also the only one resolutely looking directly into the camera. This hint of a non-conformist streak is confirmed by a student’s later assessment of her as ‘fundamentally austere, no make-up, no gesture to contemporary fashion’.² The body language of the group is also distinct: Emily France stands near the group but seems not a part of it. ‘To be different,’ she later wrote, ‘is to be disliked’.³ Years later, a student who became her friend described her admiringly as having a ‘powerful and provocative personality’.⁴ According to another friend, ‘the hard, gem-like flame that she maintained in all her relationships made it impossible to counter with less than one’s best’.⁵ While Emily did make one lifelong friend among the Girton girls of her year, the viewer can sense already a personality more inclined to bond with individuals than large groups.

Plate 1. Girton College, Cambridge, Class of 1889, Emily France far right, third row up from bottom. Photo from Girton College archives, GCPH 10/1/80. The Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge.

But why, one might ask, should anyone in our age care about a scholarly character from bygone days? One of the most persistent and pernicious assumptions in academia is that only the latest scholars are worth reading. This attitude, is, of course, conveyed by those offering the latest bold and revolutionary perspectives that with the passing of years merely look dated. Scholarship that stands the test of time may not be as immediately marketable but possesses genuine value. Those who denigrate the great scholars of the past like Paul Shorey, Basil Gildersleeve or Herbert Weir Smyth offer a more telling commentary on their own judgement than on those being judged. This volume is about a less heralded contemporary of those acknowledged mighty men of yore, Wilmer Cave Wright, who substantially advanced our understanding of the literary world of late antiquity. And yet, for all that Wright’s story is not as well known, it possesses a certain power born of overcoming adversity, for Wright was born Emily Wilmer Cave France. She came into the world in 1868, when women did not have the vote, graduated from Girton College, Cambridge, passing the Cambridge Classical Tripos but without being allowed a degree, and only received a university degree at age 27 from the University of Chicago, an institution whose coeducational policy was not secure in the early years.⁶ Publishing under the name ‘Wilmer’, almost exclusively used by men, no doubt removed some impediments, but it has also led to her being overlooked at times, such as her absence from an edited volume on female classical scholars.⁷ Even an archivist at Wright’s own institution referred to ‘His review of Rhys Carpenter’s The Sun Thief’.⁸ It went on to the extent that Paul Shorey, her doctoral supervisor at Chicago, once wrote to her about her appearing under both her names:⁹

My dear Mrs. Wright, Did you notice you appear as Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde in the Berliner Wochenschrift for Jan 9th! On the first page Asmus, in a review of somebody’s Themistius and Libanius calls attention to the ‘gediegne Arbeit’ of France and devotes most of his space to extracts from it. Later on somebody else reviews ‘Herr’ Wright’s History of Greek Literature. This is to me another proof that you should not have followed the English fashion in regard to your name. However, I have no doubt ‘Herr’ Wright in the end will achieve so much that he will not need the increments of Miss France’s glory.

References to Emily France across the span of this volume will be inconsistent, as once she began publishing, she did so using her middle name, Wilmer, and later took on her husband’s family name of Wright. I will shift my references to her accordingly and trust that the reader can keep up. So with plenty of names in play already, why ‘Steely-Eyed Athena?’ Every year on ‘Lantern Night’, the Bryn Mawr student body would gather in their class years and process around the campus singing the ‘Pallas Athene’. Particularly in the early years, with the emphasis on classical education, Athena the Greek goddess of wisdom personified Bryn Mawr, and the owl that represented the goddess remains the mascot of the College today. The epithet ‘steely-eyed’ or ‘grey-eyed’ is frequently prefixed to Athena, just as Odysseus is repeatedly ‘resourceful Odysseus’ and Hektor is ‘glorious Hektor’.¹⁰ Consider this line from the Homeric Hymns: ‘Of Pallas Athena, glorious goddess, first I sing, the steely-eyed, resourceful one …’¹¹ One admiring student would compare Professor Wright striding the halls in her jewellery ‘to Pallas Athene herself, walking the earth with a proud look and the clank of silver’.¹² The epithet is suitable in another sense as well, as she was demonstrably one of the most determined and resilient members of faculty: a holder of a research doctorate in an age where most women did not attend university, a young widow who did not break under a repressive academic regime, and a single mother at a time when that was exponentially more difficult than it is today.

Despite such obstacles, the late Victorian period was an exciting and optimistic time that seemed to offer much to young intellectuals, a dream of progress only derailed for the West by the First World War, and for Emily by the untimely death from heart disease of her young husband Joseph Edmund Wright. The absence of many records means that at some points this is less a personal and more an intellectual biography. While that is unfortunate, in some ways the late nineteenth century was a golden age of classical scholarship which spawned numerous new centres of learning; and looking at both the age and its institutions through the experience of one of its more indomitable characters is particularly illuminating. Emily saw both the peak and the post-World War decline of Western Civilisation, which in a sense was nothing new to her. She knew well both the collapse of the Hellenic civilisation she loved, but at the same time the dissemination of its literary culture into the wider world.

A closer look is also important as many of the surviving accounts contain significant inaccuracies. For example, after her death Emily’s birth date was placed in 1865, three years early.¹³ This surely would have irritated her, as she had apparently misrepresented her age in the other direction, especially after marrying a younger man. Various accounts put her as the older sister rather than younger¹⁴ or report her teaching into her eighties when in actuality she retired in 1933 at age 65.¹⁵ She also was recorded erroneously as holding the AB degree from Cambridge, properly the ‘BA’, which like all women at that time, she was not eligible to receive.¹⁶ Her obituary at the hands of the College where she had served for more than three decades got her nationality incorrect, inexplicably claiming that she had been born and raised in Ireland.¹⁷

Ultimately, while sufficient material exists to comprise a standard biography, I think it far more interesting to explore particular questions that draw upon Wright’s life. First, what ingredients went into the creation of a Classics scholar under apparently prohibitive circumstances? Was it the times, personal factors, or perhaps the difficult circumstances themselves? Second, why was it arguably Wright’s time in Chicago that was her formative experience and period? Third, why did Wright want so desperately to leave Bryn Mawr, but then stay and pour herself into her students? Fourth, through what lens did she approach the evidence of classical literature, and did it make a difference? Fifth, how did Wright survive the Thomas years at Bryn Mawr? Sixth, why did she abruptly abandon her long-term project on Libanius of Antioch? Seventh, what led her to suddenly switch from research on classical Greek literature to translating medieval Latin medical texts? The answers to these questions not only illuminate a life well lived but also resolve some puzzles in a way that may offer useful lessons for others.

In view of the mighty figures in the field of Classics at the end of the Victorian Era, it is surprising how few of those individuals have had proper biographies written of them. As regards women scholars, earlier literature, such as Sarah Davies’ book The Higher Education of Women (1866), advocated for the potential of women’s education. Some time elapsed before scholars began writing the history of this early period. Walter Eells’ article on ‘Earned Doctorates for Women in the Nineteenth Century’ in the 1956 AAUP Bulletin reveals the rather surprising statistic that women participated in doctoral-level education almost as frequently as men. As the modern literature on women in scholarship has multiplied, there are now book-length studies focusing on women in the field of Classics. In 2008, Hurst authored Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer. In 2016, Wyles and Hall published Women Classical Scholars: Unsealing the Fountain from the Renaissance to Jacqueline de Romilly. Published posthumously, Barbara McManus’ Drunken Duchess of Vassar: Grace Harriet Macurdy, Pioneering Feminist Classical Scholar details the life of someone whose challenges, including a tyrannical authority figure within her institution, closely paralleled Wright’s in many respects. Horowitz’s Alma Mater (2nd edn, 1993) details the development of the campuses of women’s colleges and their influence.

The changes and debates within the modern field of Classics have been well documented by Christopher Stray, especially The Classical Association: The First Century 1903–2003 (2003), Classics in 19th and 20th Century Cambridge: Curriculum, Culture and Community (1998) and Classics in Britain: Scholarship, Education, and Publishing 1800–2000 (2018). Some individuals from the period in addition to Macurdy have been given more thorough treatment, as in Ward Briggs and Herbert Benario’s Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve: An American Classicist (1986), or Stray again, with The Living Word: W. H. D. Rouse and the Crisis of Classics in Edwardian England (1992).

Wright began her career at Mason Science College, now the University of Birmingham, the history of which is illuminated by Eric Vincent and Percival Hinton’s The University of Birmingham: Its History and Significance (1947) and now Ives, Drummond, and Schwarz, The First Civic University: Birmingham 1880–1980 (2000). Histories of Bryn Mawr and Girton College, Cambridge have been plentiful, although primarily focused on the founders. A first-generation ‘Girton Girl’, Louisa Lumsden, wrote an account of her time in the early days in an article ‘The Ancient History of Girton College’, in the Girton Review for 1907. Barbara Stephen wrote two works about the early days of Girton: Emily Davies and Girton College (1927) and Girton College 1869–1932 (1933). All of the above are informative, but focus primarily upon the founders and the societal challenges. More reflective of the daily life of students is the 1898 article in The Leisure Hour by Classics scholar and fellow Girton graduate Alice Zimmern, ‘Women at the Universities’.

The historiography of the University of Chicago in that period is colourful and vivid, although not as complete as one might like. The founding of the university is documented by Goodspeed in A History of the University of Chicago: The First Quarter-Century (1916). Chicago’s place is assessed very positively in Rudolph’s monograph surveying the American educational scene, The American College and University: A History (1962). Richard Storr returned to the source with Harper’s University: The Beginnings; A History of the University of Chicago (1966). John Boyer has been working for years on the history of the University of Chicago, releasing short books over the course of two decades, culminating in his magisterial History of the University of Chicago (2015). The World’s Fair next door to the university campus was an inescapable influence, and the site of debates over the future of Classics as a discipline. Chicago was very conscious from the beginning that the World’s Fair or Columbian Exposition of 1893 was historically significant. The history of that monumental gathering began to take shape very early, with the multi-volume work edited by Rossiter Johnson, A History of the World’s Columbian Exposition Held in Chicago in 1893 (1897). Modern students of history, art and architecture have been well served by works such as Stanley Appelbaum’s The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893: A Photographic Record (1980) and Bolotin and Laing’s The World’s Columbian Exposition: The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 (1992).

From there, the tale becomes thoroughly entwined with the history of Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania. Cornelia Meigs assessed the ingredients of successful women’s higher education in her history, What Makes a College? A History of Bryn Mawr (1956). Rittenhouse’s Bryn Mawr College (1985) is a very focused work of primary interest to alumni, but from the same period Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’s biography The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas (1994) is a monumental achievement. The work has excited many emotions: as the President of Bryn Mawr College Thomas built an impressive legacy, but one characterised by single-minded and frequently self-serving ruthlessness. One historian’s assessment of Thomas as a ‘sacred monster’ is not far off the mark.¹⁸

Amidst all of this, our subject, Emily France, now known as Wilmer Wright, despite numerous accomplishments, receives no mention beyond an entry contributed by Mabel Lang to the Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists. In part, that would seem to be due to falling foul of a college president who not only failed to promote her successes, but seemed to actively undermine her. This returns us to the questions about how women scholars were treated in that period, and indeed how one creates a scholar in the first place.

¹Bayes 1905, 21.

²Loud and Thompson 1952; this assessment did concede her love of jewelry, however.

³Wright 1907, 370. The comment takes on added poignancy as, at the time of writing, she had, according to the reminiscences of her granddaughter, already been disowned by her father for marrying the son of a pharmacist and passed over for a long-promised promotion in favour of a less qualified male candidate.

⁴Loud and Thompson 1952.

⁵Ibid.

⁶Regarding the vote for British women (over the age of 30), this came in 1918. Women could finish their courses of study but not receive degrees as did male students, as per the discussion later in this chapter. Chicago’s commitment to educating women and men together will be dealt with in chapter two.

⁷Wyles and Hall 2016.

⁸Bryn Mawr College News Index vol. 1: 105. This continues in our own day, even in comments from those whose studies focus on the emperor Julian, e.g. Clark 1996: ‘as Wilmer Cave Wright says in his Introduction’.

⁹Shorey to Wright, 1 January 1909, Wilmer Cave Wright archive, Bryn Mawr College.

¹⁰ There is an excellent and accessible discussion of this feature of Homeric poetry in the introduction of Richmond Lattimore’s Iliad .

¹¹ Homeric Hymn 28, trans. West 2003.

¹² Loud and Thompson 1952, 15.

¹³ Emerson 1954, 223.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Harrington 1989, 1.

¹⁶ Anonymous 1910, 11.

¹⁷ Loud and Thompson 1952, 13.

¹⁸ Stimpson 1995, 5.

PART I

(1868–1910)

1

Sowing the Seeds of Scholarship (England, 1868–92)

Birmingham today dominates the West Midlands, with over four million people in its urban sprawl. The city used to be served by the cathedral in Lichfield, until the creation of the Diocese of Birmingham in 1905. In its modern guise, it daily draws thousands more commuters into its massive maw from neighbouring towns and cities such as Solihull, Wolverhampton, and Lichfield. One of the towns now inside Birmingham’s field of gravity is Shrewsbury, just over forty miles to the west, where Mr and Mrs William France’s little girl Emily was born on 21 January 1868. Given the challenges for women seeking to distinguish themselves in the Victorian era, one has to ask, how does one create a scholar? What went into the make-up of this young woman that led to her becoming a famously independent-minded academic? One might well assume some unusual circumstances, as her elder sister Georgie also went on to achieve fame as an artist, jeweller, and children’s author. Three key elements were an unusual family background, a lack of stability offered by her parents and education being seen as an outlet providing relief from an unhappy family life. All of this suggests the possibility of using scholarship as a vehicle for re-creating the self.

Family background

Shrewsbury then was a comparatively sleepy Shropshire market town, where a young estate agent named William Hanmer France had chosen to marry and settle down. France and his bride Frances Emily, who went by Emily, were married at St. Chad’s Church in Shrewsbury on 28 April 1864.¹ The wedding was performed by her brotherin-law, Charles William Cary, one of many clerical relatives. The witnesses were both from Frances