Letter from George Saintsbury (1845-1933) to Helen Waddell

In Waddell’s unpublished work ‘Discipline’ which she co-wrote with Maude Clarke, the main character, Elizabeth, is married to an anti-feminist academic and becomes resentful of him, eventually joining the suffragette movement. Elizabeth has been argued to be a mirror of Waddell, with Elizabeth’s anti-feminist husband being paralleled with G. Gregory Smith, the Professor of English at Queen’s, with whom Waddell had a number of run-ins specifically to do with her attempts to make academic progression. Waddell sent the manuscript to a number of publishers; however, they all rejected it. Waddell’s friend and literary critic George Saintsbury claimed that the rejection was owing to the fact that the editors ‘didn’t want to wake the sleeping dogs of Suffraget[t]ism.’