Introduction

Abstract

Abstract This introduces the reader to central themes of Wiskemann’s biography: her early associations with Bloomsbury circles, her aspirations for an academic career at Cambridge, her encounter with Nazism in Berlin, and its transformative effect on her life. It also situates her within a cohort of women who pursued careers in international affairs after graduating from university in the 1920s and 1930s. With few opportunities open in universities and the Foreign Service closed to women, they looked to journalism, broadcasting, and the agencies of the League of Nations. Their careers have common characteristics. They began as liberal internationalists, they were active in the anti-fascist and anti-Appeasement campaigns of the 1930s, and their trajectories were profoundly shaped by Chatham House and their Second World War service, especially in the propaganda, information, and intelligence agencies. Like Wiskemann, many spent most of their careers outside academia or on its margins. Wiskemann left no formal archive of papers and she presents challenges for a biographer; inevitably, there are gaps, silences, but her career as journalist, secret agent, and scholar illuminates larger historical issues as well as more individual themes such as her struggle to earn a living, define herself, and protect her independence.