Finding Aid for the Beatrice Harraden Manuscript, undated
For reference questions, please contact university_manuscripts@uncg.edu.
Beatrice Harraden (1864-1936) was an English novelist and social activist. This manuscript, entitled The Birthright – a Good Chance, was written by Harraden as an appeal for the Children’s Jewel Fund.
MSS 161
1 folder.
Collection is open for research.
Copyright is retained by the creators of items in these papers, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.
[Identification of item], Beatrice Harraden Manuscript (MSS 161), University Archives and Manuscripts, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Purchased in November 2000.
Beatrice Harraden (1864-1936) was an English novelist and social activist. Harraden was born in Hampstead, the younger daughter of Samuel Harraden and Rosalie Lindstedt. She was educated in Dresden, at Cheltenham, Queen’s, and Bedford colleges and received a BA from London University. Active in the suffragette movement, Harraden travelled widely in the United States and Europe, and made her appearance in London literary circles in the 1890s as a ward of Mrs. Lynn Linton. Despite her public profile in the women’s suffrage movement, Harraden was reportedly private and shy in her personal life. A passionate advocate of woman’s rights, it was the cause, not the individual woman that stirred her enthusiasm.
Harraden wrote seventeen novels between 1891 and 1928. Her second book, Ships That Pass in the Night (1893) was an inexplicable success; none of her later novels ever achieved the same popularity. Harraden died at Barton-on-Sea, Hampshire, May 5, 1936.
This manuscript, entitled The Birthright – a Good Chance is on lined paper, presumably removed from a notebook; it contains several alterations, additions and deletions, and is signed in full at the end. Harraden begins this essay, an appeal for the Children’s Jewel Fund, by writing: “When I was asked lately to write one of these appeals … my mind wandered back to the beginning of the war when at one of the Belgian refugee concentration camps in Holland I had been a witness of all the care … bestowed on the little children of the Belgians by the Dutch authorities … at least the little ones, the hope of every country, must be looked after and preserved for the future of their country.”
See more literary manuscript collections held by UNCG.
See more UNCG manuscript collections related to women's studies.