- Paperback: 303 pages
- Publisher: Dormouse Books (1 Oct 2003)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0954604601
- ISBN-13: 978-0954604608
- Product Dimensions: 20.6 x 14.8 x 1.8 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 3,548,258 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Description
From: Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies -- New series Vol. 23, No.1
"Ward's book is an indispensable source for anyone interested in the Russell-Barry family or in Beacon Hill School."
Book Description
Griffin Barry was ‘a man of small importance’ only in comparison to his famous friends among the literati of Greenwich Village in the United States, and the intellectual circle of Bertrand Russell in England. He was himself a talented and charming man. As a free-lance reporter he roved the world in the 1920s and 30s, and later worked for the U S government in New Deal and wartime agencies. But while friends of his youth such as John Dos Passos, Dawn Powell and Edmund Wilson went on to notable literary achievements, Barry’s life became obsessed with a fruitless quest for love and stability with the mother of his two children. In pursuit of this goal, the promise of his adventurous youth was frittered away.
In 1928 Barry had embarked on a fateful love affair with Dora Russell, second wife of the philosopher Bertrand Russell and the mother of his two elder children. As a feminist and political campaigner alongside her husband, Dora believed their partnership and ‘open marriage’ was an example of the ‘new morality’ for others to follow. But the birth of her two children by Barry – Harriet in 1930 and Roderick in 1932 – broke up the Russell marriage and led to acrimonious divorce proceedings in 1934-5. Thereafter the two Russell children divided their time between their parents’ households, while Harriet and Roderick were brought up by Dora in the progressive school she and Russell had founded in 1927 and which she continued to run until 1943. Barry’s hopes of replacing Russell in her life were disappointed: he remained a face at the window, looking in on the family life he could not share, until the last decade of his life when he began to know his children as young adults.
For Harriet, her father’s clumsy attempts to reclaim a paternal relationship in her prickly teenage years caused her to reject him altogether. For decades after his death she gave him not a thought. Eventually, the correspondence bequeathed by her mother led her to explore her parents’ tortured affair, and in so doing to rescue her father from obscurity. The key figures in his life have all written, and been written about, for posterity, while he remains unknown. Having traced his American origins and early working life, Harriet follows every twist and turn of the transatlantic relationship between her parents and its effect on her childhood years. The philosophy and practice of ‘progressive education’ can be seen in her experience as a pupil at Beacon Hill School, and later at Dartington Hall School. These chapters pay tribute to Dora Russell as educator, to set alongside her wider reputation as a feminist and political campaigner.
The last part of the book recounts Harriet’s own growing up, her university years in America, and her fraught relations with her father until his death in London in 1957. As a historian herself, she has set the personal story against the social and political history which shaped her parents’ lives, and to which they themselves contributed.
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