Encounters with old friends

I was mega-chuffed this week to hear from an old friend (mostly through virtual contacts though we have met from time to time) saying they were going through some old documents and came across the records of a ghastly online imbroglio in which we were involved with Toxic Person on List I Used To Curate. Had also discovered that Toxic Person is no longer on this plane of existence, but there is surviving evidence that they had not greatly changed their ways out there in the aether.

(Was greatly reminded of 'the creaking hinge' in Jane Duncan's My Friend books in which awful or at least unlikely person brings about some benign conjunction, not least Janet/Twice.)

Anyway, have been enjoying emailing to and fro, especially as they now reside in somewhere of considerable familiarity to me.

***

Possibly I should not really count Dame Janet Vaughan (1899-1993) as an actual friend, except that she keeps cropping up in different places that I dig into (besides my having catalogued a small collection of her papers at one time) and they are, usually not exactly surprising but indicative of how diverse a woman medical scientist's career might be in the first half of the C20th - curing pernicious anaemia with minced liver, medical aid in Spanish Civil War, setting up Emergency Blood Transfusion Service in preparation for WW2, 'doing science in hell' treating starvation in Belsen, Mistress of Somerville, later work on effects of radiation, etc etc.

But TIL she was the granddaughter of John Addington Symonds, yes, that John Addington Symonds, pioneer writer of privately published and circulated texts on homophile themes, collaborator with Havelock Ellis, etc etc.

I am currently reading the critical edition of his memoirs, having been lured by the siren song of one of Palgrave Macmillan's knockdown discount sales. The intro, which is about the fraught history of the memoirs and the other items left by JAS to his executor, quotes an account by her (written in later life) of going to tea with Edmund Gosse when she was but a young medical student and being silently furious when Gosse smugly informed her about burning JAS's letters and diaries 'to preserve the good name of my grandfather'. (NB the Memoirs were already embargoed until 1976.)

She was at least able to inform her aunt, Dame Katharine Furse, of the existence of the memoir and its location at the London Library and Furse was, eventually, able to read it.

But yay her, though I guess, new generation + Bloomsbury at least adjacent, one can imagine rather different views on 'preserving the good name'.