Caroline Playne: The Activities and Absences of a Campaigning Author in First World War London

Abstract

Caroline Playne (1857–1948) was a committed and influential pacifist and internationalist who published four idiosyncratic histories of the First World War in which she diagnosed the bellicosity of the peoples of Europe as a shared mental illness. Espousing many deeply conservative opinions, she frequently responded to modern society with heightened moral outrage. However, Playne was privately wholly absorbed in the charitable support of London's enemy aliens, including unmarried mothers and illegitimate children. Archival evidence of this work, along with much of the rest of her campaigning life, survives in fragments, but is suppressed from her published works and her papers. This article seeks to explore the motivations of what emerges as a sustained act of biographical erasure. The image ultimately presented is of a woman who secured a voice through the suppression not only of her sex, but also her limitless human compassion, and so arguably her very self.