(Caroline Maitland)

Poet, novelist , children’s writer.

3 December 1858 – 7 February 1920

A Tribute by Christine Pullen

Caroline Maitland—or “Dollie” as she was always known—was born in Worcester in 1858. Her father, a master tailor, was a well-educated man, but he possessed an unconventional personality, and his maverick lifestyle created problems for his family. Her mother was just eighteen when Dollie was born. She subsequently gave birth to five more children, four of whom died in infancy or early childhood. She herself died when Dollie was nine years old. In her early teens Dollie attended a local boarding school but following her grandmother’s death (and probable legacy) went to London to complete her education at Queen’s College, Harley Street.

Radford’s poetic ability was evident from an early age. At eighteen she won a local poetry prize for women. Her literary achievement attracted the attention of the eminent literary scholar Dr F J Furnivall, who befriended her during her final year at Queen’s College. Probably through her acquaintance with Furnivall, she was introduced to Eleanor Marx and rapidly became a favourite with the Marx family. It was while reading at the British Museum with Eleanor that she first encountered Ernest Radford. Dollie and Ernest Radford were married in 1883.

Like Eleanor Marx, Emest Radford had become a member of H M Hyndman’s Social-Democratic Federation. When the Federation split, Radford followed William Morris into the Socialist League. Dollie Radford, who also joined the League, was particularly drawn to Morris’s utopian vision of socialism. Despite their initial happiness, ideological differences caused tension in the Radford’s relationship. Financial worries compounded their difficulties as Ernest Radford, having abandoned his career as a barrister, was attempting to earn a living by freelance lecturing and writing—mainly poetry. Dollie Radford also regularly contributed stories and poems to contemporary journals, and in 1891, her first volume of verse, A Light Load, was published. In 1892 Ernest Radford suffered a cataclysmic mental collapse from which he never fully recovered. From this time onward, Dollie Radford, who by now had three children, had to carry the additional burden of her husband’s illness. In 1898 she suffered a further blow when Eleanor Marx committed suicide—as their mutual friend, the Jewish poet Amy Levy, had done nine years earlier. Radford’s only novel. One Way of Love. on the theme of the woman betrayed, appeared some months after Eleanor’s death at the end of 1898.

In 1900 Radford published The Poet’s Larder, a collection of short stories on the theme of men and women. In 1907 A Ballad of Victory and Other Poems appeared. In 1910 her collected Poems were published. By this time, her health was poor, and in 1911 she underwent major surgery. Ernest Radford died in September 1919, and his widow survived him by only five months, succumbing to cancer in February 1920.

MAJOR WORKS AND THEMES

A significant theme in Radford’s poetic o’euvre is that of pain and loss. Even in her earliest and “lightest” collection, A Light Load, a sombre note can be heard. However. as in her life, in her poetry, angst is always tempered by hope. Although not religious in the conventional sense, Radford possessed a deeply spiritual side to her character. She lived in an age when the simultaneous advance of socialism and feminism appeared to offer the prospect of a new dawn of freedom and equality. A utopian vision of the future is a consistent feature of the poetry written by women of the era, but all too frequently, utopianism stripped their verse of any degree of psychological veracity. In Radford’s case, below the superficial surface, a more sophisticated analysis of the human psyche can be discerned.

Some of her most joyful and witty poems were those inspired by domestic life, for example, the poems dedicated “To My Children” and her tribute to the pleasures of a cigarette—”A Novice.” It is in her later poems, such as ‘To the Caryatid” and “I Could Not Through the Burning Day,” included in A Ballad of Victory and Other Poems and her final volume of Collected Poems, that the “darker’ and more serious side of Radford’s poetic vision emerges with greater clarity.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

On the whole, Radford’s poetry was well received by her contemporaries, although she suffered somewhat from comparison with her husband. Notices that reviewed their work in conjunction, such as that in The Athenaeum of 21 September 1896, reflect the endemic sexual bias of the period. Among her literary admirers were Arthur Symons, William Archer, and Richard Le Gallienne. In 1902 Archer included a review of Radford’s verse alongside that of many of her more distinguished compeers in his Poets of the Younger Generation. Like other critics, he readily acknowledged her abilities as a lyricist, describing her verse as “exquisite.” However, unlike others, he also acknowledged her serious underlying message, paying tribute to her eloquent expression of the ‘resolute religion of her heart’. 

Unfortunately, as in the case of so many female poets of her era, Radford’s poetry gradually fell out of favour and, consequentially, out of print. The limited selection of her poems included in present-day anthologies—generally samples of her more frivolous verse—represent her as little more than a lightweight sentimental lyricist. This contemporary view is summed up by Angela Leighton in her study Victorian Women Poetry: Writing Against the Heart (Harvester Wheatsheaf. 1992), in which she dismisses Radford’s verse as a “sentimentalist model” of Victorian women’s poetry. A comprehensive re-evaluation of the entire spectrum of Radford’s work is long overdue.

Hope by Dollie Radford   read by Lesley Lightfoot:

Listen here:

AS still as a shadow falling,
As swift as a straying leaf,
And sweet as a windless morning,
At dawn when the days are brief,
Is a snare shall be set to enfold me,
Is a net shall be cast and shall hold me,
Shall gather my soul from grief.
And spun very fine the thread is,
As gossamer webs that seal
The dews in the folded blossom,
And trembling and faint I kneel,—
For my joy in the delicate weaving
That is made for my spirit’s receiving
With threads that are strong as steel.

Selected writing/publications include:

A Light Load. London: Elkin Mathews, 1891.

Songs and Other Verses. London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1895.

One Way of Love: An Idyll [novel]. London: Unwin, 1898.

The Poet’s Larder and Other Stories. Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1900.

A Ballad of Victory and Other Poems. London: Alston Rivers, 1907.

Poems. London: Elkin Mathews, 1910.The Ransom [verse play]. Poetry Review, 6 (1915): 117-53.