During her career, Viola Barnes attracted the attention of specialists in American colonial history particularly for her important monograph, The Dominion of New England (which never ceased to command respect), and, later on in life, for her tiresome conviction that only an increasingly complex conspiracy prevented publication of major research on the American Revolution. The projected work was intended to re-invigorate the imperial interpretation once dominated by Charles McClean Andrews, her original mentor at Yale. Up to 1931 Barnes's publications were impressive, a string of scholarly articles supporting the monograph and visibly extending her academic reach. Recognition outside Mount Holyoke (to which institution she devoted her entire teaching career) was also apparent from the citation in 1940, at a Women's Centennial Congress, as one of a hundred ‘outstanding career women’. She had already served as president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, an important role, and was to do so again after the war. She was as well an influential member of AHA committees. Despite debilitating fantasies of persecution, much of her exceptional energy was employed creatively. She spurned feminism yet bent her efforts to supporting and advancing able female students, developing skills as a teacher which eluded her as sometime head of department. Clearly a very gifted and dedicated person, she initially achieved in poetry and music at Nebraska University before turning aside from an assured career there to remain closer to Yale and to serve a school of history to which her colours were nailed. As she once introduced herself to Stanley Katz, ‘I am a disciple of Charles McClean Andrews’. Herein lay the tragic element that marred her successes. Professor Reid has written a balanced and fair biography, probing family influences and sensitive to Barnes's professional difficulties yet, for later decades, carefully charting how she harassed publishing houses and distinguished historians who desperately tried to convey that the primary obstruction to getting into print was created by Barnes herself. Barnes readily brawled. She could verbally assault friends and foes alike, unmercifully, as a patient younger brother, Donald Grove Barnes, himself an established historian, had frequently pointed out. Her academic career undoubtedly was hampered by adverse historical forces:perhaps foremost, the resurgence of male domination of the academic profession after both the First and the Second World Wars, as Reid has shown. Yet certainly in the 1920s the more immediately abrasive experiences were departmental ones from contact and confrontation with two eminent and equally determined senior colleagues—Nellie Neilson and Bertha Putnam—Bryn Mawr students of Andrews, more powerfully resourced, socially and academically. Some ill-health was related to this. If there was any single external event that unhinged part of Barnes's intellect it was the unacknowledged use of research embodied in her doctoral thesis first by Andrews, with respect to New England quit rents, and then more generally by James Truslow Adams. Both men subsequently made amends, but clearly they had helped to create a profound nervousness and distrust which could not be dispelled. But what most beclouded Barnes's reasoning, and prepared the way for delusions of conspiracy, was the rigid (and self-centred) notion that by 1931, at least, she had learned her profession as a historian and writer and that no one unbidden was justified in correcting her. The mind in its arrogance, and pain, had refused to move on and in particular to accept the value of extending her written commentary to more recent historical interpretations of the American Revolution of which it disapproved. A consequence was a loss to the world of years of dedicated scholarship (past recovery in print after her death) which, if not without its flaws, might well have provided a platform from which others could have moved on. By unwittingly blocking publication she did a disservice to herself and to the school to which she was devoted. The kindness, consideration and patience of members of the historical profession in seeking to help an embattled scholar is the most reassuring feature to emerge from this sad but illuminating study.
Read full abstract
Jan 1, 2023
Peter Jordan 
Open Access