Kathleen Freeman (22 June 1897 – 21 February 1959) was a Britishclassical scholar and author of detective novels. Her detective fiction was published under the pseudonymMary Fitt. Freeman was a lecturer in Greek at theUniversity College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, Cardiff, between 1919 and 1946.[1]
Kathleen Freeman was born inYardley, Birmingham, and was the daughter of a commercial traveller, Charles H. Freeman, and Catharine Freeman, née Mawdesley. By the 1911 census, the family had moved to an eight-room house at 86 Conway Road,Cardiff.[2]: 315 [3][4] Freeman's mother died in 1919, and her father died in 1932.[2]: 315 Freeman attendedCanton High School on Market Road in Cardiff, which opened in 1907. Boys and girls were both educated in the school but separately in different subjects: Canton High School offered Latin but not to girls, and Freeman's schooling did not include Greek or Latin.[2][4]
In a field dominated by men, she was an unlikely candidate to become a classicist of note.[2]: 315 No details have been found about when or with whom she started to learn ancient Greek.[2]: 316 Freeman knew Latin, French, German, Italian, and ancient and modern Greek. Except for French, which was taught at Canton High School, it remains unclear how she learnt these languages.[2]: 316
Following her graduation in 1918 when she was awarded a BA, Freeman remained at University College and was appointed Lecturer in Greek in 1919. She went on to earn anMA in 1922 and aDLitt in 1940.[6] A 1922 picture of the faculty at University College shows 41 men and 10 women. Only one of these women,Ida Beata Saxby, had adoctorate (University of London, 1918).[2]: 318 [7]
Freeman is best known for her worksThe Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Companion to Diels, Fragmente Der Vorsokratiker (1946), andAncilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (1947/48), a translation of and handbook to the fragments ofPre-Socratic philosophers collected byDiels.[8][5]
Girls' entrance, Canton High School, Market Road, Cardiff
From early in her career, Freeman worked to bring Greek texts to the general public through her work in translating texts and presenting her ideas to general audiences.[2]: 333 Freeman featured onBBC radio in 1926 presenting a series on 'Writers of Greece', including Greek authors such asAristophanes,Thucydides andEmpedocles.[9][10][11]
During theSecond World War Freeman delivered lectures on Greece for theMinistry of Information and in the National Scheme of Education for HM Forces in South Wales and Monmouthshire.[12][2]: 323 [4] She further contributed to the war effort with her selections of translations from Greek authors which featured inThe 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).[13] Her publicationsVoices of Freedom (1943),What They Said at the Time: A Survey of the Causes of the Second World War (1945) and her work with thePhilosophical 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.[14]
Freeman enjoyed success as a writer of fiction and wrote under the pseudonymsMary Fitt (1936–60),Stuart Mary Wick (1948; 1950),Clare St. Donat (1950) andCaroline Cory (1956).[15][16][17][4]
In 1926, in addition to her studyThe Work and Life of Solon, Freeman published a collection of short storiesThe Intruder and Other Stories, and her first novelMartin Hanner. A Comedy.[18] In 1936 she began publishing crime fiction under the pseudonym Mary Fitt, writing 27 books and a number of short stories. In 1950 she became a member of theDetection Club.[19] Her books were critically acclaimed at the time, although since her death many have been out of print.[20][21] She also wrote twelve children's stories andT'other Miss Austen (1956), a study ofJane Austen.
In recent years Freeman's work has been re-assessed, especially in the light of Welsh women andmodernism.[22]: Acknowledgements Her short stories have also been described as antecedents of the Kate North'squeer stories, and, as of 2019, republication of some of her short stories was planned.[23]: 442
Formerly Canton High School, now Chapter Arts Centre, Market Road, Cardiff
From some time in the 1930s until her death, she lived with her girlfriend, Dr. Liliane Marie Catherine Clopet (1901–1987), aGP and author, at Lark's Rise, a house on Druidstone Road inSt Mellons, now a district ofCardiff.[24][1]
Freeman dedicated all her novels (written as Freeman, rather than Fitt) to Clopet fromThis Love (1929) onwards. The presentation copy ofThe Work and Life of Solon has survived, which Freeman dedicated to Clopet, dated to 14 July 1926.[25] Freeman's inscription includes a slight misspelling of Clopet's name, which has been thought by antiquarian booksellerPeter Harrington,[26] to indicate that Freeman and Clopet were in the early stages of their relationship.[25] Freeman died in 1959 in St. Mellons at the age of 61. Clopet considerably outlived Freeman, dying in 1987 inNewport.[24]
1926:The Work and Life of Solon, with a translation of his poems, Cardiff: University of Wales Press Board.OCLC756460254[27]
1941:It Has All Happened Before: What the Greeks Thought of their Nazis, London: F. Muller Ltd.OCLC5290960
1943:Voices of Freedom, London: F. Muller Ltd.OCLC912104035
1945:What They Said at the Time: A Survey of the Causes of the Second World War, London: F. Muller Ltd.OCLC921002880
1946:The Pre-Socratic Philosophers; a companion to Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Oxford: Blackwell.[28]OCLC54961908
1946:The Murder of Herodes and Other Trials from the Athenian law courts, London, MacDonald.OCLC607833964
1947:The Greek way: an Anthology. Translations from verse and prose, London, MacDonald.OCLC577963906
1947/48:Ancilla to the pre-Socratic philosophers: a complete translation of the fragments in Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., Blackwell and Harvard University Press.[29][30]OCLC706866300
1948:The Philoctetes of Sophocles, a modern version, London: Muller.OCLC10111365
1950:Greek city-states, London, Macdonald; New York: W. W. Norton.OCLC654595269
1952:God, Man and State. Greek concepts, London: Macdonald.[31]OCLC307525
1954:The Paths of Justice, London: Lutterworth Press.OCLC602389093
1954:Everyday things in Ancient Greece, London, Batsford. A one-volume revision ofEveryday Things in Homeric Greece, Everyday Things in Archaic Greece, and Everyday Things in Classical Greece by C. H. Quennell and Marjorie Quennell. 1929–32.OCLC401803
1954:The Sophists. Translation of Mario Untersteiner, I sofisti, Oxford: Blackwell.OCLC504343285
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).
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 (October 1949), pp. 53–4JSTOR3293307
Irwin, M. E. (2004), "Freeman, Kathleen (1897–1959)", in Todd, R. B (ed.),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 Rosie Wyles andEdith Hall (eds),Women classical scholars : unsealing the fountain from the Renaissance to Jacqueline de Romilly (Oxford University Press)[32][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.
^Turner, N. (2019). "Miss Fitt's Misfits: Mary Fitt and the Case of the Vanished Crime Writer".Clues: A Journal of Detection.37 (2):105–114.ISSN0742-4248.
^"Mary Fitt".www.litencyc.com. Retrieved23 March 2022.
Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers – Kathleen Freeman's complete translation of the fragments in Diels (Fifth Edition, B-fragments):Google Books,HTML
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