ARCHIVE: Manuscripts. [Six oversized slipcases, numbered 1-6 with Roman numerals]
Katherine Burdekin
Manuscript Archive
1928 - 1956
A collection of 23 manuscripts, primarily of Burdekin’s unpublished novels, stories, and other writings, with occasional related material.
Katherine Burdekin (1896-1963) is best known for her dystopian future fantasy Swastika Night (1936) which she wrote, like much of her political work of the 1930s, under the pseudonym Murray Constantine.
These and later works, most of which remain unpublished, range from speculative fiction (some set in the far future), to Arthurian, spiritual, and fantastical writing, to feminist works, though gender dynamics were a continual concern of her and play a role throughout her oeuvre. Bleiler and Locke between them list only six titles by her – mostly related to time travel, future wars, visitors from other times, magical objects, and supermen.
This archive, about a third of which is in holograph (the balance being typed), is broken down as follows:
15 novels
5 short stories
2 plays
2 poems
1 extract of local mill history
Various related items
Asterisked titles in the description below are represented in the archive; a complete inventory follows the description.
The whereabouts of the manuscript of Swastika Night are unknown but in the unpublished Children of Jacob*, written in the late 1930s, Burdekin tried to explain the “historical puzzle” of how National Socialism could have arisen. She explores political themes in several other unpublished novels as well, in futuristic settings, including No Compromise* (written in the mid-1930s), and Joy in Heaven* (mid-1940s). The unpublished novel The Stars Shine in Daylight*, written as a sequel to Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, deals with gender politics and specifically lesbianism in the context of Hitler and world war.
Gender issues infuse several of her works. Present here are the galley proofs of Two in a Sack*, a novel withdrawn from publication in 1929 by Thornton Butterworth because of its exploration of androgyny. Burdekin intended it to be a “realistic bildungsroman” concerning a young woman with a “masculine soul.” Also present is the dedication copy and a proof of the novel that she wrote with Margaret Goldsmith, Venus in Scorpio* (1940), which focuses on the intense relationship between Marie Antoinette and Princess Marie de Lamballe. A late work, Altar to an Unknown Saint* (1947), is a long mystical poem which appears to have been self-published and self-bound and has the manuscript loosely inserted. These unpublished works also explore themes of witchcraft, lesbianism, rule by women, utopias, ghosts, future communes, and reincarnation.
Also included are a hand written manuscript by her friend Margaret Goldsmith, 3 letters from Havelock Ellis, and one from John Cowper Powys.
Background
Katharine Burdekin was born in Spondon, Derbyshire (UK) in 1896, the youngest of four children. Her father managed the family estate which her great great grandfather had established during the industrial revolution. When her father retired in 1906 the family moved to Cheltenham where Burdekin and her sister attended the renowned Cheltenham Ladies College as day students. After matriculating, Katharine wished to attend Oxford University. However, her parents did not consent and in May of 1915 she married Lieutenant Beaufort Burdekin, an Australian barrister. During the war she served as a nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment army hospital set up at the Cheltenham Racecourse while her husband completed his tour of duty in France. They had two daughters: Katharine Jane born in 1917, and Helen Eugenie, born in 1920.The same year Burdekin moved with her family and nanny to Sydney, living in her mother-in-law’s house. During May and June of 1921, Burdekin began and completed the manuscript for her first novel, Anna Colquhoun, a morality tale about a brilliant and tempestuous pianist who loses everything on the path to moral regeneration.
By June 1921 Burdekin had apparently separated from her husband and in 1922, after seven years of marriage, returned to England with her daughters to live with her mother and sister in Cornwall at their new house on the Minack headland where her sister Rowena Cade eventually designed, constructed, and financed the renowned open-air Minack Theatre.
In 1926 Burdekin met the woman who became her lifelong friend and companion: Isobel Allen Burns (the dedicatee of Venus in Scorpio). They lived together from 1926 until Burdekin’s death in 1963, raising her two daughters as well as her companion’s child. They finally settled in Suffolk in 1950 having spent time in Hampshire, Somerset and Essex.
Burdekin spent the 1920s and 1930s writing “in a state close to possession,” completing thirteen novels in the 1930s alone. Six novels (including the posthumously published End of This Day’s Business) reached publication; seven more still remain in manuscript only. Burdekin had a tendency to write in compressed bursts. Often, she did not take time to edit her drafts. According to her companion, Burdekin “never ... took longer than six weeks in writing any book.” She also described Burdekin’s process of composition as being akin to “automatic writing.”
Burdekin and Burns maintained quiet, private lives in the house they shared in Suffolk. They knew many writers, being on familiar terms with Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and Bertrand and Dora Russell; however, they were close to only a few, including Margaret Goldsmith, Goldsmith’s husband Frederick Voigt, and Norah James.
The Reasonable Hope (1924), Burdekin’s second novel is a “realistic exploration” of a young man, set in World War One, who became shell-shocked, and was later drawn into a bohemian artistic circle. An unnamed, but important, theme of the novel is homosexuality which occurs in many of her subsequent works. Her third book was her first experiment with fantasy fiction The Burning Ring (1927): the main character travels to three different periods in time with the use of a magic ring, growing emotionally through experiences in each place.
Burdekin’s only book for children was St. John’s Eve (1927, published in the US as The Children’s Country in 1929). It has been called a “tale ahead of its time” as it challenges the traditional gender roles through the experiences of a boy and a girl in a fantasyland where preconceptions about gender do not exist.
Her next novel The Rebel Passion (1929) which she believed to be the first of her mature books. It explored the theme of androgyny through a male protagonist in the form of a fantasy (a theme explored previously in Two in a Sack*, withdrawn prior to publication, but surviving in galley proofs dated 1928). The narrative spans thousands of years involving past, present and future. Her vision of the future specifically excludes sexuality, as the individual’s highest goal is the ability to know God through a kind of completion. Burdekin though was a strong critic of the church and adhered to no theological doctrines. She was, however, deeply spiritual.
Although Burdekin’s fiction was pervaded with philosophical ideas, her writing increasingly focused on politics, especially the conflict between communism and fascism—she recognized the dangerous character of fascism early on. In communism she believed the ideal of economic egalitarianism as the way forward for humanity in order to mature. Another area she focused on increasingly was the politics of gender, especially how masculine and feminine identities are socialized into individuals and the harm that this can cause.
During the 1930s Burdekin grew still more prolific, in response to the growing political crisis in Europe. From 1934 she published her increasingly anti-Nazi work under the pseudonym Murray Constantine, in the hope of preventing political retaliation against her friends and family in addition to increasing the seriousness with which her work would be received as that of a male author.
The satirical novel Proud Man (1934) is a sort of “ethnographic report on the condition of England in the 1930s.” Narrated by a fully-evolved being from the future who visits contemporary Britain, it explores gender roles, homosexuality, war and armed conflict, and privilege. It also analyses the fear and contempt men feel for women and the culpability of women in their own oppression (through their collusion in the oppressive system).
Burdekin’s second novel written as Murray Constantine was The Devil, Poor Devil (1934), an allegorical fiction and satire on evil in the world.
Her next two novels (also written as Constantine) The End of This Day’s Business* (composed 1935) and Swastika Night (1936) are a pair: the first imagines a female-dominant society 4,000 years in the future, and the second is set in a male-dominated Europe 700 years after Nazi victory. The former is somewhat utopian, the latter dystopian. The End of This Day’s Business was not published until 1989, over 25 years after Burdekin’s death. In this novel, women govern peacefully but have had to dominate the men in order to do so. These men have no significant contribution to make, and are denied knowledge of women’s rites or their secret language (Latin). They are thus deprived of history and of the knowledge of their past achievements and status. This book also yields a detailed history of Burdekin’s own time from the perspective of a future age.
Swastika Night is a violently anti-fascist novel, first published in 1937 but republished in 1940 as a Left Book Club selection. It was her most widely read book, with a crucial focus on Nazism as a form of “hypertrophied masculinity.” The novel is set in the 7th century of the Hitlerian millennium, in a world governed by German and Japanese empires. All records, books and monuments of the past have been destroyed by the Nazis in an attempt to turn their mythological history into official reality. The story concerns an Englishman who has the only surviving copy of the actual history of the world, and his attempts to protect and pass it on. Burdekin’s main targets here were the political values linked to patriarchy which, she observed, led to extreme expressions of fascism such as militarism, ideas of racial superiority, and what she called “the cult of masculinity.”
In a later novel (Children of Jacob*, unpublished) written in the late 1930s Burdekin tried to explain the “historical puzzle” of the rise of National Socialism.
There are several other unpublished novels in which Burdekin continued to explore political themes in futuristic settings, including No Compromise* (written in the mid-1930s), and Joy in Heaven*. (mid-1940s).
Her last published book, Venus in Scorpio: A Romance of Versailles, 1770-1793* (1940), was an examination of the intense relationship between Marie Antoinette and one of her ladies-in-waiting (Princess Marie de Lamballe), inspired by research notes given to her by Margaret Goldsmith in an attempt to help her cope with a severe bout of depression in the autumn of 1938.
Burdekin wrote little during World War Two, spending some of the time working in a shoe factory until poor health forced her to stop. She was working again by the late 1940s, and spent over a year in a printer’s shop, then in a flourmill. Burdekin maintained a strong work ethic throughout her life, but her struggle with health problems (mainly migraines) often kept her from long-term and physically exhausting labor and she struggled with cycles of depression for the rest of her life. She resumed writing when the War ended, with a focus less political and more spiritual; central themes included religion, mysticism, spiritual evolution, and reincarnation. None of these latter works have been published.
Her last work, Dolly* (1956) presents an after-death scenario: set on a riverbank bordering heaven, it concerns a group of travelers from different societies of the world who cannot enter heaven until they rid themselves of earthly prejudices, of hatred and contempt. Burdekin confessed that she liked this story, along with The Rebel Passion and Proud Man, which she thought to be her most important books.
In 1955 Burdekin almost died from an aneurysm, and returned home to Suffolk after 4 months in the hospital. She remained bed-ridden, and was nursed by her companion until she died of congestive heart failure on August 10th, 1963.
Even though Burdekin stopped writing in 1956, within a span of thirty-five years she had managed to produce a total of twenty novels in addition to poetry, short fiction, and drama. Her writing has been dismissed as a “romantic mode of artistic creation…intuitive, unrevised, and often uneven.” Though at times she seems almost child-like and naïve, at others she is subtle and incisive. According to Daphne Patai, Burdekin’s great strength lay in her “ability to draw back from the givens of her own time and place so that she might truly attend to their ageless implications” (DLB).
Inventory
DOLLY
pp 182. First page and 1/2 written in pen, rest in pencil in lined hardback notebook (8”x10”). Written 1936. Handwritten novel set in the afterlife. A pleasant fantasy set on a riverbank bordering heaven, where travelers from a variety of societies across the world arrive, They find they can only enter heaven if they have no earthly prejudices. Fantastical elements, such as unicorns. Touches on issues of religion, racism, gender. Includes Arab and Zulu spirits, as well as the spirit of a spiritualist. ‘Dolly’ is a ‘broad commentary on human types and human destiny.’
THE LAST POWER
Typed manuscript, pp 20 in soft blue card folder. Written under the name Murray Constantine. Minor corrections handwritten in pen/ pencil. Short story, also entitled ‘The Power of Merlin,’ concerning a meeting between Merlin and King Cunovar, the tyrant, in the latter’s last hour of life. The meeting includes the subjects of desire, impossibility, acceptance of defeat, love, and wisdom.
UNTITLED
Carbon copy of typed manuscript in green card folder. pp 322. Novel in 22 chapters. Some handwritten corrections in pencil. Set in 31st century firstly in Somerset, near Glastonbury, then on an island near Norway. The main character, Mordred, turns away from the utopian world and steals children to raise as ‘barbarians’, according to his evil way of life, isolated on this island. Includes spiritual evolution, a rape at the site of Dachau, reference to the twentieth century spiritual collapse. Study of abuse of power.
SILLY VASSALS
Written under the name of Murray Constantine. pp 311. Typed manuscript in beige soft card folders, with typed label on covers. Author’s name and address hand written in pen on title page of main copy under pseudonym. Minor corrections handwritten in pen. Novel in 18 chapters. Early 20th century England. Novel of love and the questioning of religious beliefs. Also original handwritten manuscript, with initials K. P. B., contained in yellow and green striped wallet folder. With an additional manuscript, 319 pp.
THE JUGGLER / ELIZABETH THINKS / ARTHUR
3 stories handwritten in the name of K. P. B. in pencil in lined hardback notebook (8” x 13”). The Juggler (64pp) and Arthur (66pp- seemingly unfinished) written on recto side. Elizabeth Thinks (pp6, no date) written at end of book which has been turned upside down (so is also recto, in reverse). The Juggler is a sweet short story concerning the circus, fortune telling and juggling. The story of Arthur concerns the arrival of King Arthur in the 20th century, including topics such as race, magic, legends, history. Elizabeth Thinks is a short story of Queen Elizabeth the First’s last thoughts before she died.
THE END OF THIS DAY’S BUSINESS (published 1989)
Written in the name of Murray Constantine. pp 289. Typed manuscript and carbon copy, both bound in black paper folders, the original mended at edges with clear tape, but rear lower corner missing. Folder of carbon copy tatty all round edges. Corrections handwritten in blue pen. Story set in far future Salisbury in 6250; Stonehenge. Novel of ideas, much discussion of female rule / matriarchy, reversal of sex roles in the past and future. Composed in 1935; published in 1989 posthumously. This novel is paired with Swastika Night (written in 1936): the former imagines a female dominant society 4,000 years in the future; the latter, a male-dominant Europe 700 years after the victory of Nazism. The End of This Day’s Business is a utopian novel with a dystopian side. Gives a detailed history of the 20th century from the perspective of the far-off future, including the ideological and political conflict between communism and fascism.
DEDHAM HALL (FRAGMENT)
Handwritten manuscript bound in salmon pink soft card folder. 6pp. Written in blue pen in the name of K. P. Burdekin, circa 1949-50. Fragment, containing introduction to flour mills, and the workers in a particular mill.
SNAKES AND LADDERS.
3 copies: the original handwritten manuscript (in pink wallet folder) written under the name Murray Constantine with 251 pp; one typed manuscript, 266 pages with handwritten corrections in blue ink. 10 chapters, each of which in original manuscript are held together with rusty paperclips. One of the typed manuscripts (in a faux black leather folder) has the name Murray Constantine crossed out and Katharine Burdekin handwritten in pen underneath. The other manuscript is in a green folder with the label of Sybil Rang & AP Simon, Literary Agents. Unpubished novel, written in 1935, examining how a girl comes to have a sense of worth as a female in a way unlike that found in patriarchal societies where women are valued only as producers of replacement males. Fantasy, death-dreams, etc.
NO COMPROMISE
Typed manuscript of an unpublished ‘political romance.’ Written under the name Murray Constantine. Bound in 4 folders each. 22 chapters. Handwritten corrections in pencil and blue ink. Written in the mid 1930’s. England in the far future, communists and fascists locked in battle, with gender included in the broadened definition of politics. Note on rear cover states this written by a John Ball, c/o John Hampson, Dorridge , nr. Birmingham.
CHILDREN OF JACOB
Unpublished novel written under the name Murray Constantine. Explores National socialism through the crisis of the main character, an Englishman, after observing Nazi youth mocking an elderly Jew washing a pavement in Vienna. Historical and futuristic. History of patriarchy with its ‘attendant traditions of power,’ spiritual humiliation. 2 copies. Typed and bound in soft card folders, both with A. M. Heath labels on front cover. pp 152. Some handwritten corrections in blue pen. Title and name also handwritten in blue pen on title page of one copy. Other copy has 3pp (194-196) typed on different sized paper.
TWO IN A SACK
Novel written in the name Katherine Burdekin, 1928. Withdrawn prior to publication by Butterworth. 5 loose galley proofs. Novel exploring androgyny; a ‘realistic bildungsroman’ concerning a young woman with a ‘masculine soul.’
HUSH - LIGHT
Novel written under the name K. P. Burdekin. No date. Typescript, 174 pp., in repaired beige soft card folder, bound with green string. Handwritten corrections in blue ink. Mention of Steiner , theosophy, wisdom of the east, spiritual healing. and the afterlife.
FATHER O’REILLY
Handwritten manuscript, pp112 in pink folder with two illustrations of food and ‘recipes cuttings’ label on cover. No date (late 1940s/ early 1950s). Short story concerning the state of the world when a simple Irish priest’s prayer for God’s Will to be done on earth comes true. Religion, collapse of Communism, peace, etc.
THE VANES
Handwritten manuscript (pp 1-5 missing) in blue ink on 151 pages of lined and unlined paper, contained in beige wallet folder. Post World War Two novel concerning spiritual questioning set in Suffolk. Some mention of Aldeburgh, Snape Maltings, Ipswich, etc.
A PLAY. UNTITLED.
Handwritten manuscript in pencil in lined beige notebook. No name, no date. pp 106 written on recto only. Three act play set in the London of the futuristic ‘British Republic,’ after a Communist Revolution which is now failing. Includes Red Guards patrolling the streets; a struggle for the leadership, opium importing, a ‘Chinaman’, love between a ‘Red’ and a ‘White’, faith, repayment of debt. The second scene of Act One is written at the end of the play, after Act three.
MORGAN LE FAY
Typed manuscript (in purple ink) bound in blue clot covers. Title handwritten on label onset to cover. Page numbers handwritten in pencil. pp 96. Handwritten corrections in pencil. ‘A romance in three acts from The Morte D’ Arthur of Malory’ by K. Burdekin, with three different addresses on title page (two crossed out). Characters include Merlin, King Arthur, Morgan Le Fay, Sir Accolon of Gaul, Quen Guenever, Sir Ewaine and Nimue- a ‘damosel’ of the lake whom Merlin loves deeply.
WALKING TO MARK
Typed manuscript (carbon copy) by Murray Constantine. No date (late 40’s/ early 50’s). pp 282 in two orange folders. One correction in blue pen. Story in three parts concerning reincarnation, Glastonbury, astrology (‘Temple of the Stars’), ghosts, spiritual adventures. Some reference to homosexuality. Part two is a different version of the story of Elizabeth and Francis in ‘Bridge of Sighs.’
JOY IN HEAVEN
Typed manuscript in blue folders bound with blue cord. Typed title label on cover. Written under the name of Murray Constantine. Stamp of Alex. McLachlan, literary typing specialist, at rear. Some corrections handwritten in blue pen on original. pp 126. Novel in 7 chapters written soon after World War Two which portrays Hitler after his death coming to terms with the actions of his life. It focuses not on the Holocaust, but on some lesser cruel acts perpetrated earlier on in his career.
FATHER TO THE MAN
Carbon copy of typed manuscript in tatty beige folder bound with green string. No date, apparently written in the 1940’s after World War Two. Unpublished novel examining the development of humans (particularly morally) within the context of history with use of time warp. Includes knights, archers, the great plague, rationing of World War Two, the afterlife (including a conversation with God).
BRIDGE OF SIGHS
Typed manuscript in blue ink under the name of Murray Constantine. No date. In green card covers bound with blue string, typed label onset to cover with address handwritten in pen under title. Title and name handwritten on title page, again with address. Inside rear cover has label with ‘Ms. Burdekin’ and address handwritten in blue pen. pp 271 with handwritten corrections in blue pen. Novel in three parts of reincarnation, Christianity and love. Includes mention of Glastonbury, witchcraft, pagan beliefs, clans of the Highlands, Holy Isle, etc. Part two is a different version of the story of Elizabeth and Francis in the manuscript ‘Walking to Mark.’
THE STARS SHINE IN DAYLIGHT
Handwritten manuscript in two unlined notebooks (San Remo pen duplicate letter books). pp 360. Plus typed manuscript of 268pp with title label handwritten onset to cover of blue card folder bound with blue string. Typed version has name (K. P. Burdekin) and address typed on lower left of title page, with title handwritten. Also, one photocopy of typed manuscript, unbound, but tied up in yellow ribbon. No date, but the manuscript is signed and dated by Isobel Burns, January 1943. Novel in two parts. Relationships, romance, gender issues, lesbians, Hitler, World War Two. Ends in Glastonbury. A curious sequel to Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, picking up exactly where Hall’s book leaves off.
UNTITLED POEM
No name, no date, no title. Poem in two parts. Typed, in beige folder bound with blue string. Includes King Arthur’s Knights and a Princess who sacrificed her life to heal a Lady.
ALTAR TO AN UNKNOWN SAINT
Eighteen page manuscript poem, loosely inserted into a revised typescript of eight pages, bound in tan suede trimmed in red leather, elaborated illustrated with the names of three knights, and with the author’s name as “Murray Constantine.”
Fourteen page manuscript, in brown paper folder.
Nine page manuscript in brown paper covers.
VENUS IN SCORPIO: A Romance of Versailles, 1770-1793. By Murray Constantine and Margaret Goldsmith. London: John Lane The Bodley Head, (1939 / 1940).
Proof copy, with the date of 1939 on the copyright page, with an autograph note to the title page: Published summer 1939 & because of outbreak of war not offered to any publisher in U.S.A.
First edition, with the date of 1940 on the copyright page; the dedication copy, inscribed for Isobel Allen, with a pencil inscription above the printed dedication of “To Isobel”: Her book.
AN OLD TALE RE-TOLD
72 page manuscript novella.
UNTITLED HISTORY
200 page corrected typescript, with 2 page typescript bibliography.
ORANGES AND LEMONS
Short fiction printed in Time and Tide, XIX.20 (May 14, 1938), 671.
CALIBAN AND JESUS
20 page typescript
PROUD MAN: Published Reviews
Several clippings of reviews of Burdekin’s satirical novel, Proud Man, in New English Weekly, New Statesman and Nation, Sunday Times, The Listener, occasional annotations.
(AS ALAN CADE 1894-1944)
14 typescript leaves of poems with occasional corrections or full manuscript poems.
(AS ELLIOT DUNBAR)
Birthday, 8 page manuscript poem.
(AS PEGGY JACQUES)
Time, Let Brotherly Love Continue, manuscript poems, each one page.
(BY MARGARET GOLDSMITH)
The Last Dance, May 24, 1913, 16 page manuscript poem.
INCOMING CORRESPONDENCE
Several letters from readers, family, and friends.
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