Kathleen Freeman (classicist)

Kathleen Freeman was born in Yardley, Birmingham, and was the daughter of a commercial traveller (Charles H Freeman) and Catherine (Mawdesley). By 1911, the family had moved to an eight-room house on Conway Road, Cardiff.[2] She attended Canton High School on Market Road in Cardiff, which opened in 1907 and educated both girls and boys. Her schooling did not include Greek or Latin, and in a field dominated by men, she was an unlikely candidate to become a Classicist of note.[3] ^[314] She attended the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, Cardiff, which accepted female and male students by the charter granted in 1893.[2] ^[317] Freeman studied with Professor Gilbert Norwood. Following her graduation in 1918 (when she was awarded a BA), she remained at University College and was appointed Lecturer in Greek in 1919. She went on to earn further degrees (MA 1922, DLitt 1940).[4]

From early in her career, Freeman worked to bring Greek texts and ideas to the general public through her work in translating texts and presenting her ideas to general audiences. Freeman featured on BBC radio in 1926 presenting the works of Aristophanes.[5]

During the Second World War Freeman delivered lectures on Greece to the Ministry of Information and in the National Scheme of Education for HM Forces in South Wales and Monmouthshire. She further contributed to the war effort with her selections of translations from Greek authors which featured in The Western Mail, a Cardiff-based newspaper. These were later published as the book, It Has All Happened Before: What the Greeks Thought of their Nazis (1941). Her publications Voices of Freedom (1943), What They Said at the Time: A Survey of the Causes of the Second World War (1945) and her work with the Philosophical Society of England, where she acted as Supervisor of Studies from 1948 to 1952 before becoming the Chairman in 1952, are further testimony to her desire to make Greek ideas accessible through translation. Freeman resigned from the university in 1946 in order to pursue her research and writing.[6]

Freeman enjoyed success as a writer of fiction and wrote under the pseudonyms Mary Fitt (1936–60), Stuart Mary Wick (1948; 1950), Clare St. Donat (1950) and Caroline Cory (1956).[7] In 1926, in addition to her study The Work and Life of Solon, Freeman published a collection of short stories The Intruder and Other Stories and her first novel Martin Hanner. A Comedy. In 1936 she chose the pseudonym Mary Fitt for her mysteries, writing 27 books and a number of short stories, many of which feature detective Inspector (later Superintendent) Mallett. She also wrote a number of children's stories and T'other Miss Austen (1956), a study of Jane Austen.[8]

In recent years Freeman's work has been re-assessed, especially in the light of queer traditions in women's writing, and new editions of her short stories are planned.[9][10]

Formerly Canton High School, now Chapter Arts Centre, Market Road, Cardiff

From some time in the 1930s until her death Freeman lived with her lifelong partner, Dr Liliane Marie Catherine Clopet (1901-1987), a GP and author, at Lark's Rise, a house on Druidstone Road in St Mellons (now a district of Cardiff).[1] [11] Freeman dedicated all her novels (written as Freeman, rather than Fitt) to Clopet from This Love (1929) onwards. The presentation copy of The Work and Life of Solon has survived, which Freeman dedicated to Clopet, dated to 14 July 1926.[12] Freeman's inscription includes a slight misspelling of Clopet's name, which has been thought to indicate that Freeman and Clopet were in the early stages of their relationship.[12] Freeman died in 1959 in St Mellons at the age of 61. Clopet considerably outlived Freeman, dying in 1987 in Newport.[11]

• Biography and bibliography by M. Eleanor Irwin
• How to Conceal a Female Scholar; or, the Invisible Classicist of Cardiff by Edith Hall
• Deininger, Michelle and Claire Flay-Petty, 'University Connections and Professional Lives: S. Beryl Jones, Kathleen Freeman and Liliane Clopet', New Welsh Reader, 119 (December 2018). Snippet available at https://www.newwelshreview.com/article.php?id=2307
• Deininger, Michelle and Claire Flay-Petty, ‘The Cash-Box and The Specimen Tin’, Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, 226 (Summer 2017).
• Greene, W. C. (1949) 'Review: Pre-Socratic Philosophers Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels by Kathleen Freeman', The Classical Journal,Vol. 45, No. 1 (Oct., 1949), pp. 53–4 JSTOR 3293307
• Irwin, M. E. (2004) 'Freeman, Kathleen (1897-1959)', in Todd, R. B ed. (2004) The Dictionary of British Classicists. Volume I, A-F, Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum, pp. 343–4
• Irwin, Eleanor (2016) 'An Unconventional Classicist: the Work and Life of Kathleen Freeman' in ed. Rosie Wyles and Edith Hall (2016) Women classical scholars : unsealing the fountain from the Renaissance to Jacqueline de Romilly (Oxford University Press)[3][2]
• Turner, Nick (2019). "Miss Fitt's Misfits: Mary Fitt and the Case of the Vanished Crime Writer". Clues: A Journal of Detection. 37 (2): 105–14.

• Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers — Kathleen Freeman's complete translation of the fragments in Diels (Fifth Edition, B-fragments): Google Books, HTML
• Inspirational People: 3. Kathleen Freeman – Classicist and Fiction Writer
• Entry for the Dictionary of Welsh Biography