A cabbage, a bohemian, and a genius, or ordinary middle-class folk?

Turnbull Library Record, Volume XIX, Issue 1, 1 May 1986, Page 61

A cabbage, a bohemian, and a genius, or ordinary middle-class folk?

KAY SANDERSON

‘Ordinary middle-class folk’ was the phrase Fred Barkas used to describe his small family in 1903. Six years later that description, at least to late twentieth century eyes, would seem quite inappropriate; but in 1903, with a thirteen year old daughter at high school, a wife who taught music part-time, and a secure job with New Zealand Loan and Mercantile, Fred saw himself and the two women in his family as ‘ordinary’ and ‘middle-class’, and was content to do so. However in an article about women why concern ourselves with Fred’s perceptions at all? The simple answer is that in his old age Fred, like many elderly middle-class men, set about recording his reminiscences; and this quite normal occupation seemingly assumed the proportions of an obsession. Between his retirement in 1919 and his death in 1932 Fred accumulated sixtyseven volumes of reminiscences and letters. Most of the letters he transcribed and had bound ‘into handy volumes’ which he fancied would ‘afford amusing, and perhaps instructive, reading for my daughter or my nephews and nieces in the years to come’. 1

The collection thus compiled consists of eight volumes of Fred’s reminiscences (modestly titled ‘Memories of a Mediocrity’), eighteen volumes of letters from Mary Rushton Barkas to her father, eleven volumes of Fred’s letters to Mary, two volumes of letters to Fred from his wife Amy, and twenty-eight volumes of Fred’s travel letters. These last twenty-eight volumes consist of letters, addressed mainly to friends in New Zealand, describing Fred’s visits to Europe, Asia and America, and are of relatively little interest to those studying women’s history. However the remaining volumes build up a detailed picture of individuals, and their lives and relationships, such as researchers are rarely able to find in a single source and are frequently unable to construct after painstaking searches through many collections. An article of this length could hardly hope to order and interpet such a vast wealth of detail. Instead, I hope, in the following pages, to bring to the attention of researchers in women’s history the strengths of the collection and the ways in which the lives of the members of the Barkas family might be used to illustrate broader themes. The collection enables us to reach an understanding of the

way in which these individuals saw their society and perceived themselves to fit into it (or, equally often, perceived themselves as misfits). Fred’s early reminiscences and letters tell us of the attitudes a well-educated young man of the late Victorian era held on the subjects of women and marriage. His wife’s letters speak of the purgatory that colonial life was for an educated woman passionately fond of music and the arts. Dissatisfaction with the new land was common enough after emigration, and this kind of predicament must have blighted many marriages. It was not unique to Fred and Amy, but such an intimate account of the relationships that grew out of it is rare indeed. Mary, the only child of Fred and Amy, pursued a career in medicine. Her life too offers information which can be used for more than simple biographical studies. Her struggle to be accepted in a man’s profession and the setbacks she encountered must have been the lot of many women attempting to forge careers immediately after the First World War and during the Great Depression. Furthermore, Mary was one of New Zealand’s many ‘expatriates’. Like other New Zealanders before and since, she chose to pursue a career to heights which were not attainable in New Zealand. A constant tugging between ambition and homesickness is ever present in her letters.

A brief introduction to each of the members of the Barkas family at this stage should help to place the collection correctly in context. Frederick Barkas was born into a middle-class family at Newcastle on Tyne in April 1854. He studied chemistry in the College of Physical Science at Durham University and graduated in 1873. During the next seven years he drifted from one inadequate job to another, and in June 1880 decided to seek better opportunities in the Antipodes. On 5 August 1880 he set out from Gravesend, travelling via Sydney in order to visit his elder brother who was a doctor in Warialda. Fred stayed in Australia until July 1881 when he took up a teaching position at Lincoln College, Canterbury. He kept thisjob until July 1883 when he resigned because of personal difficulties with another staff member. In November that year he began working for New Zealand Loan and Mercantile. He stayed with that company until his retirement in 1919.

Early in 1887 Fred ‘made a pleasant new acquaintance ... a lady of middle age [36 years], Miss Amy Parker, . . . full of conversation, a considerable traveller, a “Noble Bohemian” . . . , a music teacher, ... a woman full of common-sense, a lady of much information but little formal conventionalism’. ~ In September that year Amy and Fred were married. Amy was the only daughter of Dr Edward Parker of Liverpool. Her mother had died when she was ten years old, and she was then brought up by a stepmother ‘who could not understand love of freedom on the part of a woman’. 3 Amy had

been an independent young woman travelling through Europe and Australia as a governess and teacher. Late in 1885 or early in 1886 she left Liverpool for New Zealand, where she settled in Christchurch and taught music as well as acting as ‘morning governess’ for the children of George Harper. By 1905 Fred and Amy’s marriage was beginning to deteriorate. Amy did not like living in New Zealand. It was a ‘one horse country’ fit only for ‘cabbages and sheep’. However, ‘ordinary middle-class’ Fred was happy with his job and his neighbours and would not be persuaded to return to England. The solution which he and Amy arrived at was not divorce, but an agreement whereby he made Amy an annual allowance which enabled her to spend most of the remaining years of her life after 1909 in England. She died in 1920.

In September 1889 Amy gave birth to a daughter who was named Mary Rushton Barkas, the ‘Rushton’ being a tribute to Amy’s brother Dr Rushton Parker. Not surprisingly, Mary’s interests as she grew tended to be of a scholarly nature. In 1905 she was dux at Christchurch Girls’ High School and gained the fifth highest marks in the country in the Junior Scholarship Examination. In 1908 she graduated B.Sc. at Victoria University College, and M.Sc. with second class honours in Chemistry at the end of 1909. She was

offered a Government Research Scholarship to continue her work on Taranaki petroleum, but turned it down in order to keep house for her father while her mother was in Europe. In 1913 Mary left this life of domesticity and went to London where she studied Home Science at King’s College for two years, and then went on to study medicine. In 1918 she qualified M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P. at the Royal College of Surgeons, London. In 1923 she gained a Diploma in Psychological Medicine from the Royal College of Physicians, London, and in 1924 she became qualified as a Doctor of Medicine and was awarded the University of London Gold Medal in Psychological Medicine. After several years in posts at the Bethlem, Hellesdon, and Maudsley hospitals Mary was appointed Superintendent of the Lawn Hospital in Lincoln. Throughout her years in London Mary was a very active member of the Fabian Society and the National Guild League.

Fred’s reminiscences of his younger years provide an unusually candid record of his attitude towards women, courtship, and marriage. His letters and diaries reveal some desire to ‘understand’ women, and he held views which were probably typical of educated men during the Late Victorian era: the woman’s intuition complemented the man’s logic; women were the equals of men, entitled to education and freedom of choice, but ‘if a woman goes about with her eyes open and her heart not fast shut, I think’, Fred wrote to his sister ‘that in time she will see that marriage for most of her sex is the best and noblest career’. 4

In 1883, at the age of twenty-nine, Fred confided to his diary that he ‘should like to marry and settle down’. For his wife-to-be he chose a young woman friend with whom he had no particular romantic attachment. He counselled himself that he should not be impatient in his courtship. Implicitly there were rules to be followed—the man was to humble himself before the woman of his choice and be patient. As it happened Barkas was willing, but the lady was not. Fred, apparently, was incapable of playing these games. He bemoaned his failure to his brother:

No, I shall never win a woman by slow steady attention—no Jacob’s seven years of service for me. ... I could sing “Come into the Garden, Maud” and if she came with not too much coyness and placed her hand in mine—l shall be her faithful servant and best friend; but to storm the house, to be rebuffed and to attack again and again is not to my liking as a way of winning the woman. 5

When Fred and Amy agreed to marry it was little wonder that Amy should have been the initiator. Fred seems to have been more in awe of Amy’s independence and strength of character, than a victim of Cupid’s arrow. On 17 April 1887 he listed in his diary the ‘pros and cons’ of marrying Amy in what seems to have been a

rather dispassionate manner. Despite this coolness a week later he announced their engagement —and once the decision had been made Fred was smitten, and not at all concerned that he, the man, had played what is usually thought of as the femine part. In May he wrote to his sister, ‘the queer part of this latest episode of mine is the very passive and small role I played. I never dreamed of anything of the sort happening but, now that it is all settled, it appears the most natural and fitting thing one could imagine for me. Furthermore Fred felt no embarrassment about the fact that he was not master in his own home. ‘Who’s Boss?’, he wrote to his brother a year after marriage. ‘ln our case there was no room for discussion on that point, it was clear from the very beginning who was “Boss”. Needless to say I am NOT the proud holder of that position.’ 7 Fred doted on Amy and revelled in domesticity. For him marriage was all-absorbing. Two years after meeting Amy he described himself as having ‘no aspirations, wishes, ambitions —hardly any dreams—beyond my daily work, my garden, and our quiet hearth’. 8 While this mood lasted Fred’s letters were full of news about Amy and descriptions of the domestic activities which made up their lives. Amy was thirty-nine when Mary was born in 1889. Her pregnancy and labour were both difficult and the birth was ultimately induced. Fred described it all in minute detail —a much fuller account than I have come across in any of the diaries and letters kept by women during that period.

In 1904 Amy took Mary to Europe so that she would have the opportunity to learn to speak French and German fluently. By the end of January 1905 they were back in New Zealand, but domestic bliss had become a thing of the past. Fred identified this return to Christchurch as the time when he and Mary began to draw closer together and the drifting apart of himself and Amy began to show itself. Perhaps predictably, references to domestic life became increasingly rare in his reminiscences which became more and more taken up with his business activities. Later that year Fred was appointed manager of the Wellington Branch of New Zealand Loan and Mercantile, and moved north. Amy and Mary followed when the school year was over. In 1909 Fred and Mary moved to Timaru. Amy left for Europe. She never returned to New Zealand with the intention of staying.

The collection shows us two Amys. There is the very practical and unconventional woman Fred perceived when he was in love during the late 1880 s and early 1890 s. Then there is a gap of nearly ten years before we meet Amy again, this time through her own letters and the perceptions of her daughter. Amy of 1905 was discontented and difficult. She was also nearly sixty years old. She appears to have been a meddling old woman with a hyperactive

mind. Constant changes of opinion, and denials of ever having said things which are clearly recorded in her earlier letters, leave one with the impressions that no ‘fact’ which Amy referred to can be taken at face value. Fred generously annotated one of her letters with the comment that ‘she was a wonderful woman, and ought to have made a success as a writer of entertaining fiction’. 9 The reasons for the breakdown of her marriage can probably be attributed in large part to her dislike of New Zealand and the ‘cabbages’ who inhabited it. Late in 1909 she wrote to Fred in stunned amazement:

I have had quite enough of the kind of society N.Z. offers to me, yesterday afternoon spent with Mrs Geo. Ross and Mrs Clarke Johnson being a sort of climax. 1 took a map to show them where Mary and 1 had been, and where I proposed to go, and I came to the conclusion that neither of them knew what the Riviera was, and as to the Tyrol, Botzen, etc. etc. I might as well have talked to Maoris. You remember when I first came here, my meeting a room full of Hobson St. ladies who none of them knew what Chamber Music was. 111

Amy claimed that at the beginning of their married life Fred had agreed to retire in 1914 and return to Europe, and that for twenty years she had stinted and saved in order to make this possible. Fred denied ever having made such a promise. This disagreement over where they should live was compounded by an incompatibility of temperament. Virtually every page written by Amy between 1904 and 1920 harped on the theme of Fred’s retirement and the family’s living together in England or Europe. Fred confirmed this impression in his reminiscences: ‘my wife was always bothering me by urging me to “chuck” my Loan Co. job, realize my insurances and other moneys, buy a joint annuity, and retire with her to a “happy cottage” in England.’ 11 There was a constant series of new schemes to this end which Fred clearly found difficult to live with. Fred’s unwillingness to leave New Zealand was, in Amy’s opinion, the attitude of a ‘peevish old bore’. Fred, like most other colonials, she considered (at least in this context) a ‘cabbage’. At the end of 1909 Amy took the decisive step. She left for Europe, telling Fred, ‘you and Mary can come when you darned please’. Amy returned to Timaru a year later, but Fred found her impossible to live with and agreed to provide her with an allowance of £IOO a year on condition that she would stay away from Timaru. Amy returned to England, but never gave up her dream that the family would be reunited in England, a fact which Fred found pitiable. ‘No one’, he wrote,

can be more deeply sorry than I am that you should have allowed yourself to acquire a habit and temperament which has made it impossible for me to contemplate resuming a joint daily life with you, and my sorrow is all the greater when

I see that it is almost equally impossible for you to live in mutual harmony with your daughter who, without a shadow of a doubt, you sincerely love. 12

Fred’s assessment of the feeling between Mary and Amy seems to have been accurate. When she went to London in 1913 Mary rejected the option of living with her mother. Her relationship with Amy, like Fred’s, was full of complications. In Amy’s opinion it was Mary who had come between herself and Fred, Mary who had supplanted her as housekeeper in her own home and as first claimant to her husband’s affections. But Mary was also her ‘genius’ daughter, the young woman of whom she could say, ‘anything she wants to do, she can do, and I must say I know of no other girl so

all-round capable’. 13 In Amy’s opinion marriage was fit only for ‘brood hens’ and Mary did not fall into that category. Mary was to have a career befitting her ‘birth and genius’, and early plans to marry in New Zealand were rigorously opposed. The influence which this frustrated and intelligent late Victorian woman had on her twentieth century daughter’s career is well worth study, and the letters written by Amy and Mary provide a mine of information about this complex relationship.

Probably the most distinctive part of the collection is the series of letters from Mary to Fred. The first of these was written in January 1904 when fourteen year old Mary was on her way to Europe. Shortly after Mary returned to Christchurch in 1905 Fred was transferred to Wellington and regular correspondence again took place during Mary’s last year at school. Mary then joined her father in Wellington and only spasmodically had occasion to communicate with him by letter during her first years at university. However in 1909 Fred was transferred to Timaru and the correspondence began again, Mary having stayed in Wellington in order to complete her M.Sc. Mary spent the next three years living in Timaru with Fred, and so their correspondence once again was only occasional. In 1913 Mary left for England. She and Fred agreed that they would write a ‘daily page’ informing each other of their activities. This resolution was never abandoned, and even though sometimes Mary’s daily page was neglected week after week, it was very rarely the case that a month would pass without a letter. This frequent and intimate communication continued until Fred’s death in 1932, the only significant gaps being in parts of 1917 (when Mary visited New Zealand) and of 1920 and 1923-1924 (when Fred was in England). Father and daughter were very close and although it is clear that Mary was not prepared to disclose every detail of her life to her father (she refused to let him see Dr Rank’s report on his psychoanalysis of her in 1922), one feels that so far as her career and political activities were concerned (and these took up most of her time), Mary was very open with her father. This impression is confirmed by her warnings that he should not discuss her medical cases or publish her opinions without her express permission. Any lapse on Fred’s part in this respect resulted in threats that future letters would have to be less frank and confiding. This series, then, provides an intimate and detailed account of Mary’s life between the ages of fourteen and forty-two.

In 1904 Fred was surprised by the quantity and quality of his daughter’s letters. A relation whom Mary visited in England described her as ‘old for her years .. . she has self control. . . and could sit and listen to her mother’s exaggerations quietly, and then just as quietly and calmly contradict the statements’. 14 Her self-confidence

was clearly well developed. Even at fourteen Mary’s ambition was to become a doctor. She was following in the family tradition, but was independent enough to resist her mother’s inducements to trade on family contacts in Britain. Mary had obviously been brought up to think of herself as the equal of any man. She wrote to her father that she would

hate to be a regular inhabitant of. . . any town in Switzerland or France. . . . Girls can never go out alone with boys, and all sorts of things like this; girls even when engaged have to show their letters to their mother, and when they are married—to their husbands—-just think of it. They are so different from us. . . . When you see the men and hear them speak to girls,—there is no respect at all, —-just regard them as toys, or as housekeepers and servants —never as equals. 15

The fact that Mary found this attitude different tells us quite a lot about the relationship between the sexes in New Zealand (at least as Mary had experienced it). Furthermore, at fourteen, Mary saw her future fulfillment in being able to work for her own living. She encouraged a young woman whom she met in Germany to study for a degree: She wants to earn her own living, but her father won’t let her as he is rich enough to keep her, —as if the fact that her parents could afford to keep her in luxury made up to a girl for the independence she has in working for her livelihood, and appreciating the money so much the more when she has earned it herself. u>

Although Mary was in Europe primarily to learn French and German and to become acquainted with the great cultural centres of the world, she subjected herself to a strict programme of study, mainly of botany, chemistry and mathematics, turning down social outings and depriving herself of sleep in order to keep to her selfimposed timetable. When Mary returned to England in 1913 it was with the intention of studying domestic science, an interest which at first glance suggests a lowering of her ambitions. However one must remember that in New Zealand the subject had recently been accorded the status of a university discipline. Mary believed that domestic science should incorporate specialised studies such as medicine —it was ‘no piffling play at housework’ that she wanted. ‘Medicine’, she wrote ‘is essentially the way in which women can at present most advance the cause of Domestic Science in its highest sense.’ 17 Given this perspective her pursuing this course was not inconsistent with her long-lived ambition to be a doctor, and it is little wonder that, having made a beginning, it was not long before she turned to the study of medicine proper. Mary began her medical studies shortly after the outbreak of World War One. The war years seemed to offer opportunities for

women which they had never had before. More and more hospitals began to open up posts for women students and doctors. Mary’s first job was at Bethlem, an exclusive private mental hospital. The position was at first temporary, but was later extended indefinitely. In August 1919 Mary left Bethlem in order to continue her studies. That year she obtained the Certificate in Psychological Medicine of the Medico-Psychological Association, and passed the examination fortheM.B. degree of the University of London. However the War was now well over and finding another job was to prove difficult. At the end of 1919 she confided in her father, ‘the prospects in Medecine [sic] are extremely depressing, there being at least 20 candidates, and often more, for every job, and there are yet some thousands of medical people to be demobilised.’ 18 Moreover priority was being given to returned soldiers. In January 1920 Mary was appointed house physician at the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic; but the position was temporary. A colleague on the staff said that the appointment had been made for three months only because of anti-feminist prejudice. He felt that the board were trying to put off the time when they would have to appoint a woman permanently. Despite the temporary nature of her appointment Mary was able to stay at the National Hospital until about March 1921. After several months of unemployment she was appointed to another temporary position, this time at Hcllesdon Hospital, a public mental hospital in Norwich. At the end of 1921 Mary left England in order to continue her studies of psychoanalysis in Europe. She spent two months in Germany gathering material for her M.D. thesis and then went to Austria where she spent five months mostly in Vienna.

One of Mary’s primary objectives in visiting Europe was to undergo psychoanalysis herself. She felt that this was desirable for its therapeutic benefits and necessary if she was ever to truly understand how the process worked and be able to practise it herself. There was nobody in England who she believed had the necessary experience and ability to teach her, so she turned to the master —she wrote to Freud. However, Freud had a ten month waiting list and charged an exorbitant fee. He recommended that if Mary did not want to wait she should approach one of his pupils, Dr Rank of Vienna. Mary did so and was very satisfied with her choice. By May 1922 she had encountered Freud in person several times and felt

heartily glad Freud couldn’t take me and sent me on to Rank; for apart from the fact that the double fee would have run me into some financial shortness . . . the more I see of Freud the less 1 like him, not that he isn’t a marvellous man and has done extraordinary work; but he is so worshipped by his pupils that he adopts rather a

god-father attitude of all wisdom, and as he has analysed himself and not been analysed by anyone else it seems to me he has a good many unresolved complexes. 19 plexes.

During the six months after her return to England Mary was able to secure only temporary employment. However early in 1923 she was appointed on probation for one year as Assistant Physician at Maudsley Hospital, a large mental hospital run by the London County Council. The appointment was extended after the year, but Mary had little hope of ever being permanently satisfied by this job. She found working for the London County Council frustrating—her time was filled with routine matters which left little time for research, and there was no hope of promotion. It was at the Maudsley that Mary learnt that jobs for women in most hospitals were confined to junior positions. She was eventually promoted to the position of second in charge at the Maudsley, but only on the condition that she would accept the promotion as temporary. For the London County Council it was inconceivable that a woman should advance beyond that point. They therefore did not want a woman even in that senior a position as it would block the way for junior men wanting to move up. Mary was to hold the position for one year only. Faced with this predicament Mary began looking for another job.

Early in 1928 she was offered and accepted a post as Superintendent of the Lawn Hospital in Lincoln. The Lawn was a small private asylum with two doctors on the staff. Both the junior doctor and Mary’s predecessor were women. Colleagues in

London were appalled that Mary should accept a position at such a small institution. Dr Rice at the Hellesdon wrote to her,

What right have you to bury yourself and your abilities in a little out of the way, one horse, dead-alive, luxurious place like that? ... You would be simply chucking yourself away and robbing the community as a whole of your services, which seems to me an absolute scandalous waste of abilities. 2 "

Mary was fully aware of the fact that she was isolating herself from her professional community. However the Lawn offered her what she had struggled so hard to achieve and had been denied elsewhere: the opportunity to be in control of a hospital and to test her own ideas. She consoled herself with the thought that the small number of patients would ensure that she had plenty of time for research. From her earliest days at the Lawn Mary was aware that the hospital had been badly managed and was burdened with an uninterested and inefficient Board of Governors. She attempted to remedy the situation by increasing the number of patients and placing the hospital’s finances on a sounder footing. Her efforts were rewarded by early success, and in April 1930 she was able to report an increase in the number of patients and £lO credit! Moreover she was exercising considerable selectivity in her choice of patients, avoiding those with chronic mental illness whom she could do nothing to help. At the same time she attempted to raise the hospital’s professional standards by encouraging her nursing staff to undertake courses of study. However the hospital was poorly equipped and the staff were underpaid. With these handicaps it could not hope to compete with even the most backward public institutions. In August 1930 Mary confided in her father: ‘l’m pretty “fed up’’ with “The Lawn”—there seems no hope of getting any “forrarder” in improving the place, as the Governors won’t make any effort to collect funds —and I am seriously thinking of trying to find “a better hole”.’ 21

By 1931 England was firmly caught in the grips of the Depression. The Lawn’s accounts for the quarter ending 31 March showed a loss of some £750. Mary predicted that the hospital would be bankrupt by the end of the year. The anxiety resulting from financial and staffing problems was compounded in August when a patient committed suicide. Mary’s confidence was dashed and she gave up hope. She wrote to Fred:

I feel generally that I’m a complete failure, and think I shall insist on resigning and letting them get some one else, as a last hope at setting the place on its feet. . . . Anyway, I’ve had about as much as I can stand and shall be off my head completely if things go on much longer like this. 22

Three weeks later the situation had not improved. The financial failure of the Lawn had led to brutal self-assessment and in total despair Mary wrote to her father:

If I go on much longer I shall get “Melancholia” myself. I never cease to admire your amazing zest for life, and your ability to enjoy things. I shouldn’t so much mind if I had occasional manic phases with some energy and zest, and even a transient feeling that I was some good at anything, or to anybody. I find it almost impossible to imagine how anyone can really enjoy life, or feel reluctant to be released from it. . . . It’s an uphill fight always struggling against one’s inertia, and a blank sense of futility and uselessness. I’ve always been on the edge of dementia praecox I think; always lacking energy and interest; I could easily become like the patients that “just sit” and vegetate. . . . One often sees patients who break down when they reach a level of educational or social success which is too much for them, but may keep going on a lower level. I rather feel just now that I’ve reached this stage and want to sit down to some simple routine job under orders and without worry and responsibility. 23

Mary’s career had reached a climax. She wanted and needed to escape —to Europe and Rank or to New Zealand and a quiet place by the sea. She began to question the value of psychotherapy and therefore all that she had worked for. The prospect of returning to the filth of London was totally unattractive. Staying at the Lawn was impossible, but so was leaving when it was in such a precarious

position. She yearned ‘to go and meditate in the Wilderness on a whole lot of ideas, and try to sort them out away from the distractions of ordinary affairs’. 24 Her last letter in these volumes was written on 21 December 1931 and echoed this tone of despair. Fred died in September 1932. Mary returned to New Zealand to wind up his estate, and stayed. She sent her resignation from New Zealand, and spent her remaining twenty-seven years living in retirement at Tapu near Thames.

The above has been just a brief synopsis of an interesting career. Mary had always yearned for a warm climate and the simplicity of a cottage near the sea. Her ambition had pulled her in other directions. The desire to return to New Zealand had always been strongest when unemployed or confronted by a lack of opportunity for advancement. As a young woman Mary was full of enthusiasm for her career, for her political ideals, and for life itself. At twentyfive she had tramped alone through the Swiss Alps sleeping out at night, and she continued these solo excursions throughout her twenties and thirties. It was ‘the age of the lone woman tramp’ she explained to her father. What brought her to the point where she wrote those last despairing letters, and what induced her to give up all those years of study and struggle for a quiet life in a bach on the Thames coast? Only an extensive biographical study could answer these questions. Her letters to her father alone cannot provide the answers. The impression that she had achieved a high professional standing in Britain acquired in the course of reading her letters would have to be tested in other sources —correspondence with her professional colleagues (if it exists) and citations of her published papers. Likewise the empty space after her return to New Zealand —her twenty-seven years of retirement —needs to be filled in. Was the Lawn episode a passing despair or did it lead to a total turning away from her career? Was Mary’s failure to find fulfillment in her career due to her own personality and unique circumstances, or was this futile struggle the lot of most women who sought to reach the highest positions in their professions during the years between 1918 and 1935?

The Frederick Barkas collection is held in the Manuscripts Section of the Alexander Turnbull Library at MS Papers 2491. The volumes in the collection were passed from Fred to Mary, who had them in her possession until her death in 1959. In 1983 they were donated to the Library by descendants of Fred’s sister Issie

Southern. The collection is available for the use of all bona fide researchers, although quotation or reproduction requires the permission of the donor.

There are few collections in the Library which offer so much detail about such interesting lives. The individuals in the Barkas family were open with each other. They did not hide their feelings or express them in terms of vague generalisations. The collection is important to those studying the lives of women between 1880 and 1930, and deserves to be used.

REFERENCES 1 Alexander Turnbull Library, Barkas Collection (MS Papers 2491), v. 1, p. 2. (All references are to this collection.) 2 Letter from F. Barkas to Issie Southern, 3 March 1887 (v. 5). 3 F. Barkas to A. Barkas, 1 May 1887 (v. 5). 4 F. Barkas to Issie Southern, 27 February 1887 (v. 5). 5 F. Barkas to Charles Barkas, 18 February 1887 (v. 5). 6 F. Barkas to Issie Southern, 17 May 1887 (v. 5). 7 F. Barkas to Charles Barkas, 4 September 1888 (v. 5). 8 F. Barkas to Charles Barkas, 14 February 1889 (v. 5). 9 Amy Barkas to F. Barkas, 24 March 1914 (v. 39). 10 Amy Barkas to F. Barkas, 3 November 1909 (v. 38). 11 Vol. 7, p. 114. 12 F. Barkas to Amy Barkas, 23 May 1915 (v. 39). 13 Amy Barkas to F. Barkas, 23 June 1912 (v. 38). 14 MrsJ. Southern to F. Barkas, 2 August 1904 (v. 38). 15 Mary Barkas to F. Barkas, 28 April 1904 (v. 9). 16 Mary Barkas to F. Barkas, 28 October 1904 (v. 10). 17 Mary Barkas to F. Barkas, 1 August 1914 (v. 12). 18 Mary Barkas to F. Barkas, 28 November 1919 (v. 19). 19 Mary Barkas to F. Barkas, 15 May 1922 (v. 21). 20 D. Rice to Mary Barkas, 11 January 1928 (v. 24). 21 Mary Barkas to F. Barkas, 31 August 1930 (v. 26). 22 Mary Barkas to F. Barkas, 5 September 1931 (v. 26). 23 Mary Barkas to F. Barkas, 24 September 1931 (v. 26). 24 Mary Barkas to F. Barkas, 19 October 1931 (v. 26).