Kathleen Cecilia Nott, FRSL, (11 February 1905 - 20 February 1999), was a British poet, novelist, critic, philosopher and editor.

Life

Kathleen Nott was born in Camberwell

Camberwell

Camberwell is a district of south London, England, and forms part of the London Borough of Southwark. It is a built-up inner city district located southeast of Charing Cross. To the west it has a boundary with the London Borough of Lambeth.-Toponymy:...

, London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

. Her father, Philip, was a lithographic printer, and her mother, Ellen, ran a boarding house in Brixton

Brixton

Brixton is a district in the London Borough of Lambeth in south London, England. It is south south-east of Charing Cross. The area is identified in the London Plan as one of 35 major centres in Greater London....

; Kathleen was their third daughter. She was educated at Mary Datchelor Girls' School (now closed), London, before attending King's College, London. She soon left King's College on an Open Exhibition scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford

Oxford

The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...

. The scholarship was in English Literature, but on arriving at Oxford, Nott switched to PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics).

It was at Oxford that she met Christopher Bailey, an electronics and computer engineer, whom she was to marry in 1929. During the 1930s, Nott was a social worker and psychologist in the East End of London, an experience which would inspire her first novel, Mile End (1938), which is set in the area. Bailey's work took the couple to the Netherlands

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

, from which they escaped when the German army invaded in 1940.

During the war, Nott and Bailey lived in Bournemouth

Bournemouth

Bournemouth is a large coastal resort town in the ceremonial county of Dorset, England. According to the 2001 Census the town has a population of 163,444, making it the largest settlement in Dorset. It is also the largest settlement between Southampton and Plymouth...

, and afterwards they moved to Sweden

Sweden

Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

. The marriage was dissolved in the 1950s, and they had no children.

It was her book The Emperor's Clothes (1953), which drew Nott to the attention of a much wider audience. An atheist

Atheism

Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities...

, Nott attacked what she described as the "neo-scholasticism" of such dominant religious literary figures as T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis.

In 1954, Nott began contributing book reviews to The Observer

The Observer

The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...

; much of her critical work would appear in that newspaper. Essays and reviews by Nott were also published by Encounter

Encounter

Encounter may refer to:In psychology:*Encounter , an authentic, congruent meeting between individuals*Encounter group, a form of group psychotherapyIn games:*Encounter , an international network of active urban games...

, Partisan Review

Partisan Review

Partisan Review was an American political and literary quarterly published from 1934 to 2003, though it suspended publication between October 1936 and December 1937.-Overview:...

, The Nation

The Nation

The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States. The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865, It is published by The Nation Company, L.P., at 33 Irving Place, New York City.The Nation...

, The Listener, New Society, Commentary

Commentary (magazine)

Commentary is a monthly American magazine on politics, Judaism, social and cultural issues. It was founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945. By 1960 its editor was Norman Podhoretz, a liberal at the time who moved sharply to the right in the 1970s and 1980s becoming a strong voice for the...

, The Times

The Times

The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

 and The Spectator

The Spectator

The Spectator is a weekly British magazine first published on 6 July 1828. It is currently owned by David and Frederick Barclay, who also owns The Daily Telegraph. Its principal subject areas are politics and culture...

. Nott's last review for The Observer was published in 1986. She also wrote extensively for the humanist and rationalist movement, and many of her articles were published in the Rationalist Annual, Question, and Humanist.

Nott also translated books and articles.

In the early 1970s, Kathleen moved to Horsham

Horsham

Horsham is a market town with a population of 55,657 on the upper reaches of the River Arun in the centre of the Weald, West Sussex, in the historic County of Sussex, England. The town is south south-west of London, north-west of Brighton and north-east of the county town of Chichester...

, where she lived with a friend. Later in the decade she moved in with one of her sisters in Thornton Heath

Thornton Heath

Thornton Heath is a district of south London, England, in the London Borough of Croydon. It is situated south-southeast of Charing Cross.-Geography:...

.

Nott was a member of The University Women's Club and the Society of Authors

Society of Authors

The Society of Authors is a trade union for professional writers that was founded in 1884 to protect the rights of writers and fight to retain those rights .It has counted amongst its members and presidents numerous notable writers and poets including Tennyson The Society of Authors (UK) is a...

. In Who's Who she listed her recreations as playing the piano and gardening . Nott was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

Royal Society of Literature

The Royal Society of Literature is the "senior literary organisation in Britain". It was founded in 1820 by George IV, in order to "reward literary merit and excite literary talent". The Society's first president was Thomas Burgess, who later became the Bishop of Salisbury...

 in 1977.

Nott suffered from deafness and Parkinson's Disease

Parkinson's disease

Parkinson's disease is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system...

 in her later years. When she died, Nott was living at Wemyss Lodge Residential Home Swindon

Swindon

Swindon is a large town within the borough of Swindon and ceremonial county of Wiltshire, in South West England. It is midway between Bristol, west and Reading, east. London is east...

, Wiltshire

Wiltshire

Wiltshire is a ceremonial county in South West England. It is landlocked and borders the counties of Dorset, Somerset, Hampshire, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire. It contains the unitary authority of Swindon and covers...

.

Critical reception

Mile End (1938), Nott's first novel, was reviewed by the Times Literary Supplement. The reviewer felt that there was "something a shade clinical, a trifle too scientifically tolerant or indulgent, in the view of humanity unfolded here", and found Nott's prose "sharply individual but perhaps a little too mannered in its intellectual precision." Nevertheless, "she gives the impression of having entered with astonishing acuteness and subtlety of mind into the impulses of the Jewish temperament, the psychological sway of Jewish religious lore and messianic tradition, the alien intensities of the social and domestic mood of the ghetto." The reviewer concluded that it was "an admirably balanced story, which gains in narrative force and even in warmth as it advances."

Nott's debut collection of poetry, Landscapes and Departures (1947) received a positive review in the Times Literary Supplement. The reviewer said that although Nott was a "difficult poet", her "quality as a writer is immediately obvious", concluding that "In spite of the difficulty of her poems, Miss Nott deserves to be read. She has a rich, harsh and rather masculine talent, and every poem here is full of vigour."

PEN

Kathleen Nott became involved in the writers' organisation PEN

International PEN

PEN International , the worldwide association of writers, was founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere....

 in the 1950s, becoming editor (initially acting editor http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001429/142951eb.pdf ) of the organisation's journal, PEN Bulletin of Selected Books (later renamed PEN International), in 1960. She held the post until 1988.

She was briefly President of PEN in 1975 http://www.englishpen.org/aboutenglishpen/pastpresidentsofenglishpen/, staying on as a vice-president until the end of her life.

Humanism and rationalism

Kathleen Nott was a committed humanist

Secular humanism

Secular Humanism, alternatively known as Humanism , is a secular philosophy that embraces human reason, ethics, justice, and the search for human fulfillment...

 and rationalist

Rationalism

In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" . In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"...

, as signalled by the publication of her controversial The Emperor's New Clothes (1953), Writing on the occasion of Nott's death, former National Secular Society

National Secular Society

The National Secular Society is a British campaigning organisation that promotes secularism and the separation of church and state. It holds that no-one should gain advantage or disadvantage because of their religion or lack of religion. It was founded by Charles Bradlaugh in 1866...

 General Secretary Colin McCall explained the significance of the book:

You need to realise the literary situation in post-war Britain to appreciate the importance of Kathleen Nott... This was a time when T S Eliot reigned supreme, not only as poet, but as critic; when Graham Greene, C S Lewis and Dorothy L Sayers were, in their different ways, spreading dogmatic Christian orthodoxy; and when the Times Literary Supplement (January 22 1954) said the acceptance of authority in matters of religious belief "is now once more an important constituent in European letters". It was the philosophical inadequacies of this "constituent" that Kathleen Nott had exposed in The Emperor's New Clothes...

Nott contributed chapters to H.J. Blackham's collection of essays, Objections to Humanism (1963) (a humanist response to Objections to Christianity from the same publishers), and The Humanist Outlook (1968), edited by A.J. Ayer. In "Is Rationalism Sterile?", Nott wrote:

To be too analytical, to demand explanations, reasons, and logical or moral justifications can, we know, destroy human trust and therefore human relations... Safeguarding, the longing for final reassurance characterizes all of us, rationalists and religious alike, and the prestige of objective truth is only an intellectual parallel... It seems to me that the 'theologians' on either side of the rationalist-supernaturalist controversy have become mere case-makers, primarily out for proofs. (Natural enough, no doubt, but meanwhile the riches of feeling, religious or human, have been flung out with the bath-water.) It looks as if some kinds of argument, whatever they appear to be about, can indeed be largely sterile because they are not really aimed at finding a synthesis, a solution, at making peace. They belong to a side, they are covert polemic, and they aim at victory. With warfare of all kinds, truth is indeed the first victim.

For Nott, rationalism "in the nineteenth-century dyed-in-the-wool sense of being almost wholly preoccupied with the question of the existence of God, and with rebutting any supernatural sanction for morality", is "sterile"

. However, "I do not think that humanists have to be rationalists in the old sense." .

In "Humanism and the Arts", Nott said that "humanists of our time are not as strong as they should be on the meaning and value of art and the artist." She also admitted that "as soon as I begin to write about Humanism or speak from a Humanist platform I find mysself in full retreat towards square nought. If someone does not ask me what or who is a humanist - I find I am asking myself - or the audience." Returning to the theme of Is Rationalism Sterile?", not observes that:

Many humanists seem to be just non-Godists. All they seriously worry about is the mid-Victorian controversy and it is here that they seem irremovably stuck... the large mass of contemporary literature has made at least one thing clear: that on the subject of God's existence and of the supernatural there is no longer any possibility of reasoned communication.

Instead, Nott advocated that humanists should examine "the real possibilities of the real concrete human being." She continued:

The job for the humanist is to try and extract the human values of religion, to separate them out from the theological languages in which they disguise themselves.

Nott was President of the Progressive League

Progressive League

The Progressive League was a British organisation for social reform, founded in 1932 by HG Wells and C.E.M. Joad under the title "Federation of Progressive Societies and Individuals" .-The "Great Conway Hall Plot":...

 (1959-1961), and an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association

Rationalist Association

The Rationalist Association, originally the Rationalist Press Association, is an organization in the United Kingdom, founded in 1899 by a group of free thinkers who were unhappy with the increasing political and decreasingly intellectual tenor of the British secularist movement...

, from 1979 until her death in 1999 .

Philosophy

• The Emperor's Clothes: an attack on the dogmatic orthodoxy of T.S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Dorothy Sayers, C.S. Lewis, and others. (1953). London: Heinemann.
• A Soul in the Quad (1969)
• Philosophy and Human Nature (1971)
• The Good Want Power: an essay in the psychological possibilities of liberalism (1977)

Novels

• Mile End (1938)
• The Dry Deluge (1947)
• Private Fires (1960)
• An Elderly Retired Man (1963)

Poetry

• Landscapes and Departures (1947)
• Poems from the North (1956)
• Creatures and Emblems (1960)
• Elegies, and other poems (1981)

Articles and book chapters

• "Is rationalism sterile?" (1963) in Blackham, H.J. (ed.) Objections to Humanism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964, pp. 55-78.
• "Mortal Statistics" (1964), Commentary, October. Available online (subscription required)
• "The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler" [book review] (1964), Commentary, November. Available online (subscription required)
• "Koestler and his critics" (1968), Encounter, Vol. 30 (2), pp. 76-81.
• "Humanism and the Arts" (1968). in Ayer, A.J. (ed.) The Humanist Outlook, London: Pemberton/Barrie and Rockliff, pp. 177-185.
• "Ideology and moral reality" (1985). New Humanist, Vol. 100 (4), Autumn, pp. 18-20.

Translations

• Chauvet, Lucien (1948). North-Westerly Gale.
• Bacchelli, Riccardo (1956). Son of Stalin.