Note on Sources
The principal sources for Margery Spring Rice’s personal life are the letters and papers preserved by members of her family. These include hundreds of letters, unevenly distributed in terms of date, but nevertheless extending over the whole course of her life. The Garrett and Jones families are both well-represented in these letters, but there is almost nothing from the Spring Rice side. Most of the letters are to her, from family and friends, rather than from her. Spring Rice kept two brief diaries, one in childhood and one when she was a young woman, which have survived, and her brother Douglas kept a diary over a twenty-five-year period. Towards the end of her life, one of Spring Rice’s grandsons recorded, transcribed and annotated her recollections of various incidents in her life. The visitors’ books that she kept from 1936 until 1970, far more than just a record of names and dates, also survive. One other extant document is a copy of the fifty-page statement that Spring Rice made to the court in 1929, when she was thinking of applying for custody of her two youngest children. I very much hope that some, at least, of these papers will end up in a public archive.
Where I have quoted from diaries and letters, I have not made any editorial alterations, but have kept the quotations exactly as in the originals. In footnotes to letters, I thought it clearer to refer to Spring Rice throughout as ‘Margery Spring Rice’, even when the letters date to periods when her name was ‘Garrett’ or ‘Garrett Jones’. On the same principle, I have referred to Spring Rice by that name throughout the book. I have treated other women’s names in the same way, using the most appropriate surname for each.
There is a mass of material, particularly for Spring Rice’s public life, available in public archives: the records of the North Kensington Women’s Welfare Centre and the Family Planning Association are in the Wellcome Archive; Eileen Power’s letters to Spring Rice are in the archives at Girton College, Cambridge; Spring Rice’s correspondence with Benjamin Britten is in the archives at the Red House in Aldeburgh (now part of Britten Pears Arts); and Stella Benson’s diary is in Cambridge University Library. Unfortunately, none of these has been digitised. There are also copies of Edward Jones’s World War I letters in the Imperial War Museum.
A biographer will always have to contend with gaps in the record, some of which may not even be recognised. In this case, there is one large gap that I am aware of: the great majority of the surviving letters are addressed to Margery Spring Rice, not written by her, so the contents of her letters often have to be deduced from the replies. The exceptions to this are the correspondence with Britten (of which both sides are extant) and, to a lesser extent, the records of the North Kensington clinic, which contain a number of her letters, though of course these are not primarily personal. It is particularly frustrating not to have Spring Rice’s letters to Dick Mitchison — they may possibly survive in private hands but are not accessible at the present time.
Many people have parts in Spring Rice’s story. To make it easier for the reader, in the index, I have given family members’ relationships to Spring Rice under their names.