Ada Radford’s life was defined by her commitment to education and educational reform. Her published work, often inflected by her experiences as a teacher, included short stories, children’s literature, translations, poetry, biographies of historical women and memoirs. Often tempering her championing of the woman worker with stark reminders of women’s economic deprivations, her contributions to journalism reveal her socialist leanings.

Born in Plymouth, Devon, as the ninth of ten children in a non-conformist family, Ada Radford was the daughter of a draper. After attending Plymouth High School for Girls, she studied mathematics at Newnham College in Cambridge, from 1881-83. One of the first generation to attend the newly founded women’s university colleges, she forged important friendships at Newnham with Helen Gladstone (1849-1925) and Constance Black, later Garnett (1861-1946) (Sutherland Dictionary). Daughter of the eminent Victorian prime minister, Helen Gladstone would go on to co-found the Women’s University Settlement in Southwark, London, in 1887 as part of the reformist movement whereby the middle classes “settled” amongst the working poor; she later became vice-principal of Newnham (1892-96). Constance Black made her name as a translator of Russian fiction and was associated with socialist circles through her sister Clementina Black (1853-1922), who founded the Women’s Trade Unions Association in 1889, later to become the Women’s Industrial Council (1894-1917) (Livesey 53-55). Radford also knew the novelist and poet Amy Levy (1861-89), who studied at Newnham from 1880-81. She published an appreciative review of Levy’s poetry in 1899, identifying the “love of London” evident in the “city impressions” in Levy’s little-known collection A London Plane-Tree (1889), and the “unconquered idealism” of her work (Wallas 162, 163).

Radford’s career in teaching began with a year at Wimbledon High School. She also taught at the village school on Dartmoor in Devon, whilst keeping house for one brother before his marriage (Sutherland Dictionary). She moved back to London in 1893 where she would become involved in the Yellow Book circle. In the 1890s she was an unpaid assistant editor on the periodical Free Russia (1890-1915), the organ of the English Society of Friends of Russian Freedom for the exiled revolutionary Feliks Volkhovsky (1846-1914) and an honorary lady superintendent of the College for Men and Women in Queen Square. Radford had the freedom of choice to undertake voluntary work and develop as a writer in London because of her “modest private income” from family legacies (Sutherland Dictionary).

It is likely that Radford’s London connections were forged through family and socialist networks. Her well-connected brother Ernest William Radford (1857-1919) moved in aesthetic and socialist circles. An associate of William Morris (1834-96), founder of the Arts and Crafts Movement, Ernest acted as secretary to the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society (1888-92) and became one of the poets in the Rhymers’ Club in the 1890s. He lectured at Toynbee Hall, the first settlement house, in the East End. In 1883 he married Dollie Radford (1858-1920) who went on to publish aesthetic poetry in the later volumes of The Yellow Book and a number of poetry collections. The couple were active in the revolutionary Socialist League and were members of the Men and Women’s Club (1885-89) in London, which met for radical debate about gender, politics, and society and included other members such as Eleanor Marx (1855-98), Karl Pearson (1857-1936) and Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) (Livesey 134). Ada’s marriage in December 1897 to the Fabian socialist and co-founder of the London School of Economics Graham Wallas (1858-1932) cemented the family’s connections with the socialist scene and educational reform.

Radford’s acquaintances broadened as she moved in more liberal and progressive circles after marriage, working with her husband’s friend, the American socialist essayist Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946). Her only daughter May Wallas, who Ada was to nurse through various periods of ill health, was born in 1898. Following in her mother’s footsteps, May attended Newnham before studying at London School of Economics, then returning to lecture at Newnham. In 1918 Ada’s poems were included in her brother Ernest Radford’s publication Songs in the Whirlwind under her maiden name, suggesting the significance of the Radford brand.

Radford’s fiction takes inspiration from new models of the educated woman in the 1890s, even as it reveals the deleterious effects on health of women’s entry into the labour market. In common with other Yellow Book contributors such as Evelyn Sharp (1869-1955) and Charlotte Mew (1869-1928), Radford can be considered as a writer of stories about the single woman. Spinster fiction, which can be thought of as a sub-genre of New Woman fiction, drew on contemporary notions of the Glorified Spinster and the Woman of the Future. Spinster heroines reaped the benefits of a life outside marriage and motherhood whilst questioning the extent of the freedoms associated with female singleness (Liggins 77-8). Her two Yellow Book stories explore the discontented position of the single woman and her subservient role in the Victorian household. They appeared in Volumes 11 and 13, when female contributions to the journal were at their height (Adams 67). Like the more well-known aesthetic poetry of her sister-in-law Dollie, Radford’s stories cannot be easily assimilated into mythologies of the Yellow Book’s trade-book decadence but are perhaps better understood in terms of “John Lane’s diverse mix of iconoclastic aestheticism and social realism” which promoted proto-modernist writing side by side with “scientific socialism” (Livesey 160).

Radford’s heroines are usually conscious of their own economic deprivation and the broader deprivations which impact female lives. Grace, the sister and niece figure of “Lot 99,” seems uncannily aligned with the stuffed birds and fish of the hated oppressive library, where she had an “uncomfortable” (267) writing-desk as a child. The National Observer reviewer admired Radford’s “feeling for character,” but puzzled over the “strange elusiveness” of the plot and title (“Autumnal” 24). The title refers to the auctioning of the family home on the death of her aunt, reminding the heroine of previous financial negotiations which reinforced her lack of power. Her limited education, she reflects, “had not left me in a position to maintain myself” and her dreams of being a teacher are “crushed” by her family (270). Unlike her lawyer brother, she is house-bound and bored in the “gloomy room,” where she tried to “look forward” (278), longing for an adventure which never arrives. Like Ella D’Arcy’s (1857-1937) story “A Marriage,” which concludes the volume, Radford’s story also addresses men’s unfulfilling marriages to women of a lower social station after unplanned pregnancies, drawing together the plight of middle-class and lower-class women subsumed by domestic trivialities.

Radford’s later story “Lucy Wren,” with possible echoes of Sharp’s earlier Yellow Book narrative of the tiredness of the urban worker “In Dull Brown” (1896), draws on her experiences as a teacher hemmed in by monotony and social conventions. The eponymous teacher heroine, “a grey scholarly little person,” “not pretty, but not exactly a dowd” (272, 284), is a tricksy figure who oscillates between a knowing distancing from her more frivolous or flirtatious women companions and a dark desolation and sense of being “half alive” (276) as she wanders around the city. The acknowledgement of her own “shocking” (283) reciprocated desire for her friend Ella’s husband saves her from suicide at the end of the story, even if the ambiguous ending also suggests that her canny friend manipulates her into taking another post out of temptation’s way. As reviewers noted, “The Yellow Book does not favor the short story with a definite conclusion” (“Bad Art” BR5), leaving readers to decide on the spinster’s fate. This ambiguity allowed for the potential transgressiveness of the mistress beneath the dullness of spinsterhood (Liggins 107).

Radford’s interest in the single woman is developed in her later stories for the London-based Liberal daily, the Westminster Gazette (1893-1928). Owned by the prolific publisher George Newnes (1851-1910) and edited by J.A. Spender (1862-1942) from 1896-1921, the Gazette, like Newnes’s Strand Magazine, became known for its short stories, also publishing work by D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), and Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923). After 1897, Ada Radford published under her married name of Ada Wallas; perhaps, like her acquaintance E. Nesbit (1858-1924) who also published as Mrs Hubert Bland, aligning herself with her husband’s socialism.

Ada Wallas’s Gazette stories develop themes of the responsibilities of teaching and the recalcitrance of the female child, with the focus on the young reflecting her ventures into children’s literature in her twentieth-century writing. “Lulu” (1900) offers a variation on teacher-student intimacies, with Lulu a younger wayward child who resists school authority. Typically narrated from the teacher’s point of view, the story ends with the teacher musing on whether she has “mistaken her vocation” (2) in her inability to impress on her small but defiant charge the importance of right and wrong. The significantly titled “Barriers” (1901), which draws on socialist thinking about sisterhood and the Settlement movement (Livesey 135), addresses the awkwardness of cross-class influence. This narrative centres on a dialogue between an apparently single female teacher and an ex-pupil Rose Hayter, newly encountered in a Rescue Home for unmarried mothers after the death of her illegitimate child. Embarrassed by the consequences of Rose’s “freedom,” the unnamed teacher reflects: “an affection had grown between us, not strong enough to bridge the gulf between class and class, but strong enough at times to defy it” (2). The story works against the expectation of shame and despair which might attend the fallen woman. Rose reveals that the Home is populated by more girls from the teacher’s old class. By the end of the story the teacher narrator feels that she has “failed utterly to help or to advise” (2) in the face of Rose’s reluctance to go into service as suggested. Their shared grief over the baby’s death dispels some of the awkwardness, but it is Rose’s narrative of motherhood which dominates the ending of the story, interrupting musings on the teacher’s duty.

Other stories expose the ways in which the female child becomes subservient to men’s learning. Radford’s disturbing Gazette story “Tommy” (1901) considers the imaginary academic and professional life created for the eponymous male doll by the young Janet, as a way out of the confining dullness of the nursery and schoolroom. A series of “horrid” (1) tricks by her brothers show the doll upside down in a flowerpot or—as if to flaunt Janet’s uncertain future—propped up reading the Book of Common Prayer in the nursery. Goaded on by their sister’s anger, defiance, and resentment, the boys finally position him “hanging from a gas-bracket” (2) in the nursery, with a mock confession note. The story ends with a tearful Janet throwing the doll into a disused quarry next to the garden. “Professor Green,” in her 1906 collection for children The Land of Play, satirises women’s eager support of men’s academic endeavours. The male Professor contentedly writes his History of the Universe, whilst his wife organises his meals and the young child Diana provides a map of the Roman Empire based on her own history lessons.

In later life Radford continued to champion women’s education. She worked as a volunteer at one of the London Schools for Mothers, started in 1907, resulting in “a sustained interest in work to improve maternal and child welfare” (Sutherland Dictionary). During the First World War she translated the work of French philosopher Ėmile Chartier (1868-1951). From 1919-34 she served on the council of Bedford College, supporting her friend and the college’s principal, Margaret Tuke (1862-1947). A final key publication was Before the Bluestockings (1929), which included entertaining biographies of educated women from Hannah Woolley (1622-75) to Mary Astell (1666-1731), collecting together previously published material from the Contemporary Review from 1920 and 1922. Her early reminiscences appeared under the title Daguerreotypes in 1929. Radford’s interest in the educated Englishwoman who challenged convention by claiming her right to study and work in a world which valorised male learning spans her whole oeuvre.

©2024, Emma Liggins, Reader in English and Co-Director of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom.

Selected Publications by Ada Radford (Wallas)

• “Lot 99.” The Yellow Book, vol. 11, October 1896, pp. 267-82. Yellow Book Digital Edition, edited by Dennis Denisoff and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Yellow Nineties 2.0, Toronto Metropolitan University Centre for Digital Humanities, https://1890s.ca/YBV11_radford_lot99/

• “Lucy Wren.” The Yellow Book, vol. 13, April 1897, pp. 272-84. Yellow Nineties 2.0, https://1890s.ca/ybv13_radford_wren/

• “The Poetry of Amy Levy.” The Academy, vol. 57, 12 August 1899, pp.162-3.

• “Lulu.” Westminster Gazette, 28 June 1900, pp. 1-2.

• “Barriers.” Westminster Gazette, 17 August 1901, pp. 1-2.

• “Tommy.” Westminster Gazette, 5 October 1901, pp. 1-2.

• The Land of Play. London: Edward Arnold, 1906.

• (with Ernest Radford) Songs in the Whirlwind. London: Smith’s, 1918.

• Before the Bluestockings. London: Allen ＆ Unwin, 1929.

• Daguerreotypes. London: Allen ＆ Unwin, 1929.

Selected Publications about Ada Radford (Wallas)

• Adams, Jad. Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives, Reaktion Books, 2023.

• “Autumnal Tints.” Review of The Yellow Book, vol. 11, October 1896, National Observer, 21 November 1896, p. 24. Yellow Nineties 2.0, https://1890s.ca/yb11-review-national-observer-21-nov-1896/

• “Bad Art in the Yellow Book.” Review of The Yellow Book, vol.13, April 1897, New York Times, 17 July 1897, BR5. Yellow Nineties 2.0, https://1890s.ca/yb13-review-new-york-times-july-1897/

• Liggins, Emma. Odd Women? Spinsters, Lesbians and Widows in British Women’s Fiction, 1850s-1930s, Manchester University Press, 2014.

• Livesey, Ruth. Socialism, sex and the culture of aestheticism in Britain, 1880-1913, Oxford University Press, 2006.

• Ada Wallas Obituary, The Times, 15 October 1934, p.19.

• Sutherland, Gillian. ‘Wallas [née Radford], Ada. Dictionary of National Biography, published online 26 May 2016.

• Sutherland, Gillian. In Search of the New Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Britain, 1870-1914, Oxford University Press, 2015.