Professor Dame Averil Cameron, who died earlier this year, was an exceptionally distinguished and industrious scholar. She began her work on Late Antiquity with a biography of Procopius and expanded early on into the fuller study of Byzantium. Right to the end she was quick to spot shifts in disciplinary frameworks and, in her typically acute and measured style, to take account of them; one of her last published essays interrogated Byzantine Studies in the light of recent conversations about ‘colonialist’ disciplines. The book based on her Sather Lectures, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire (1991), helped precipitate a sea change in early Christian studies, marrying historical developments with the study of discursive techniques in a way that few have since accomplished so successfully. When her administrative work as one of the first female heads of house at a formerly male college in Oxford prevented the more creative research and writing that she preferred, she took on prodigious editorial projects, including volumes 12, 13 and 14 of the Cambridge Ancient History. She was obviously a gifted administrator and committee member, but in this memoir she makes clear that it was above all her academic work that she valued. She was very proud that her DBE came with a citation for services to classical scholarship. This list merely scratches the surface of a significant academic life.
As her memoir makes clear, there was little about C.’s background that predicted her stellar career. She was born in a tiny house in the Staffordshire market town of Leek, next door to her maternal grandmother’s house. Leek was the world; everything else, including the village three miles away where her father grew up, was known as ‘away’. Her father worked for the local paper mill, and it was a source of pride for him that they made the onionskin paper for the exquisite bibles then published by Oxford University Press. (What would he have said to his daughter’s becoming head of house at Oxford?) Her mother stayed largely at home – quite literally. C. was an only child, protected and cosseted and feared for. Her sharp intelligence must have been apparent early on, though, for she took the ‘11-plus’ a year early and won a place at the local grammar school. There, several teachers fostered her talents, in particular the young classics teacher June Wrathall, who set her on course for Somerville College, Oxford: ‘June was the first person I knew who read a lot and owned a lot of books’ (p. 38).
C.’s trajectory at Somerville was exceptional: she achieved a ‘double first’, but despite that ‘it had not occurred to me that I could or should aim for an academic career’ (p. 55). She was by that time engaged to Alan Cameron, himself an ambitious young classicist who was appointed a lecturer at Glasgow, and she presents her enrolment for the PhD at Glasgow almost as a pastime to occupy her when she joined him there after their marriage. Be that as it may, her brilliance shone forth once again and she was appointed to a position at King’s College London before she had even completed the dissertation. The rest, as they say, is history.
Reading this book made me realise that I know of almost no precedent for the memoir of a distinguished female academic. That C. would have been dubious about the insertion of the descriptor ‘female’ into that sentence is clear. She firmly subtitles the book ‘A Historian’s Memoir’, no gender involved, and though in recording her friendship with another great historian, Elizabeth Clark, she regrets that ‘I did not do more to promote women’s interests and women’s studies’ (p. 108) and rightly celebrates her early appointment as female head of house, she remains ambivalent about where – and whether – her femaleness fits into her narrative. I think of Lorna Sage’s masterpiece Bad Blood (2000), where the narrative more or less stops when she gets to university, and Terry Castle’s autobiographical essays in The Professor (2010). Both women were accomplished essayists as well as academics, and neither takes on the full arc of a career. Both works are intensely personal and not really about their professional identities.
C.’s memoir is in many ways more complicated, while appearing more conventional on the surface, and that seems to me to be linked both to the lack of models in the genre and to her own ambivalence about being specifically a female academic. On the one hand, it is quite a conventional academic cursus honorum, albeit presented for the most part with great modesty. For example, the awards of the CBE and the DBE are despatched in a single paragraph, which ends with a tart reflection on the way in which the heavy formal brooches ruin one’s clothes. On the other hand, there are blistering accounts of academic battles both in London and once she returned to Oxford as Warden of Keble College (at one point she writes, ‘the change provoked much protest and opposition’ [p. 244], and the observation could have appeared on any of the Oxford pages). Alongside these are intermittent comments about her two children, whom she seems largely to have brought up alone and to whom she was clearly devoted; there are also snapshots of intellectual trajectories, perhaps most vividly expressed in her regret for the books she did not write (no big book on orthodoxy and heresy; or on dialogues; or on ‘the role played by Christianity within the Byzantine state’ and its ‘striking preoccupation … with the definition and enforcement of heresy’ [p. 290]). Too much committee work!
Amid her sequential and rather dry account, various themes emerge and recede. One is the theme of what it was like for a woman born in 1940 to make her way with such distinction through an intellectually wide-ranging academic career, notwithstanding early motherhood, the pressure to embrace domesticity and the stigma of early divorce. ‘Fig. 1’, showing her at a 1970 Dumbarton Oaks symposium soon after the birth of her first child, speaks volumes: she is the only woman and by far the youngest person present. There is also, more pressingly but even less explicitly, the theme of social class, of the doors opened by grammar school but also of the lives left behind. She writes movingly of the emotional cost to her parents of sending her off to Oxford and in the epilogue, she writes, ‘I realise now that … the huge transition I made ha[s] held me back more and for longer in terms of confidence than I would have admitted until now’ (p. 294). The candour with which she writes of her regrets is striking. There is something defiant in the recurring references to her clothes (that DBE star) and shopping. Fiercely, she claims the space of her own memoir and her right to include what she chooses, as she managed to claim so many other spaces in her life.
C.’s move into Byzantine studies was in many ways a claiming of intellectual space. There is here an implicit criticism of the discipline of Classics, its myopias and restrictions. She writes of her intellectual expansion at KCL after ‘the narrowness of Oxford Greats’ (p. 94), and says firmly later on, ‘I regard it as the responsibility of historians to inform themselves about periods beyond their personal specialisms’ (p. 146). This disciplinary narrative is another that emerges and recedes in the course of the book.
I barely knew C. Reading this memoir made me wish that I could have sat down and talked with her about it. She would probably have dismissed the idea as a waste of our time. But just as her memoir has few precedents, so too did the trajectory of her life. She was a remarkable woman. It was a remarkable life.
