Helen Waddell

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Helen Waddell (1889 - 1965) was an Irish poet, translator and playwright.

She was born in Tokyo, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister who was lecturing in the Imperial University. When still very young, her family returned to Belfast, where she was educated at Victoria College for Girls and Queen's University Belfast.

After earning a BA with first class honours in English followed by a Master’s degree, she enrolled in Somerville College, Oxford to study for her Doctorate.

She is quite well known for bringing to light the history of the Medieval goliards in her 1927 book, "The Wandering Scholars". Her other works range wide in subject matter. For example, she also wrote plays. Her first play was "The Spoilt Buddha", which was performed at the Opera House, Belfast by the Ulster Literary Society. Her "The Abbe Prevost" was staged in 1935.

She also wrote many articles for the Standard, Manchester Guardian and The Nation and did lecturing and broadcasting.

Helen Waddell was the assistant editor of "The Nineteenth Century" magazine. Among her circle of 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 William Russell.

Waddell received honorary degrees from Columbia, Belfast, Durham and St. Andrew's and is the only woman to have won the A. C. Benson Medal of the Royal Society of Literature. ^[1]

A serious debilitating neurological disease put an end to her writing career in 1950, until her death in London.