Florence Stawell

Florence Melian Stawell (2 May 1869 – 9 June 1936) was a classical scholar, essayist, editor, and translator of ancient Greek.

Quotes

... After Philo and Plato, it was little use to say that Christ was merely like God, and the Spirit that came to us like both. Only the thorough-going assertion of unity could satisfy the longings and quiet the doubts that had been raised.
- (1905). "Hellenism and Christianity". The Independent Review Volume IV, October 1904—January 1905: 229–235. (quote from p. 232)

When the idea of Democracy first took hold of the modern world, it brought with it to many minds the demand for the independence of woman. To many minds, but not to all, and this because the strongest arguments for that independence are bound up with the fundamental conceptions of the democratic ideal, and not with the secondary advantages of a democratic state, and there are always minds on whom the second have far more influence than the first. It is probably for a similar reason that the political enfranchisement of woman has made so little headway in Europe during the last century. For this has been a time of detailed work in legislation, rather than of far-reaching ideas.
- (1907). "Women and Democracy". The International Journal of Ethics 17 (3): 329-336. DOI:10.1086/intejethi.17.3.2376122. (quote form p. 329)

... At the outset we are shown the two great armies, Greek and Trojan,—both winning our sympathy,—the one fighting for honour and justice, the other for home and country. We are shown Helen, the fair woman who is at once the cause of the war and its prize; we are shown the two kings, Priam in his noble endurance, Agamemnon in his restless activity; we are shown the two champions, Achilles and Hector, both lovable and attractive to us, sworn enemies to one another.
- "Chapter I. Introduction". Homer & the Iliad: An Essay to Determine the Scope and Character of the Original Poem. J.M. Dent & Company. 1909. pp. 1–10. (quote from p. 1) text at archive.org

The last works of a great artist have always a peculiar interest, and when they are the works of his old age they often show a peculiar change. The greatest artists do not copy themselves: stereotyping is fatal to creation. For creation, it cannot be denied though frequently forgotten, is always the production of something new, and this is why so often it is neglected or scorned by contemporaries. The creative artists, though their work corresponds with experience, are always outstripping experience, stretching forward to something they have never fully known, entering fresh worlds only half realised. Beethoven, Rembrandt, Titian, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, all show this in various ways. There is something unearthly in their closing work, and at the same time they are more at peace with this earth than ever. Nor is this because the world appears less terrible to them than it did, but because they seem to discern something more which countervails the terror.
- "Introduction". Iphigenia in Aulis. play by Euripides. George Bell & Sons. 1929. pp. 9–29. (quote from p. 9; 128 pages; translated from the original Greek into English verse with an introduction by F. Melian Stawell; preface by Gilbert Murray)

A quarter of a century ago, when the Minoan marvels were first discovered, all scholars were struck by their likeness to the works of later Greece. Even now, when the knowledge of dissimilarities in detail has obscured for many minds this broad resemblance, no one would assert that a close connection of race or of language is impossible.
- A Clue to the Cretan Scripts, Volume 26. George Bell & Sons. 1931. p. 2.

Melian Stawell (1869-1936) begins life as a certain kind of outsider. Born into an elite Australian colonial family, she received great early encouragement in her education, had access to a home library, and studied at Melbourne University and then Cambridge. Henceforth her academic, political, and friendship base was in England, wher she wrote a great number of significant texts in classics, as well as Aristotle, the League of Nations, Women and Democracy, and in particular a work on the Phaistos Disc (1911) that is still highly regarded. Her work is in the Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf at Washington State University-Pullman, including The Growth of Intellectual Thought (1929), with reading annotations by Leonard Woolf.
- Suzanne Bellamy, "review of Virginia Woolf, Melian Stawell, and Bloomsbury by Karen Levenback". Virginia Woolf Miscellany (issue 97, Spring/Summer 2021): 54-55.

Like several other interwar liberal internationalists, F. Melian Stawell was a classicist by training, set for an illustrious career at Cambridge working simultaneously on the ancient Greeks and contemporary world order. Stawell is best known as the author of The Growth of International Thought, a book increasingly cited, if not read, as the first to use the term ‘international thought.’
- Glenda Sluga, "Chapter 10. From F. Melian Stawell to E. Greene Balch: International and internationalist thinking at the gender margins, 1919–1947". Women's International Thought: A New History. Cambridge University Press. 2021. ISBN 9781108859684. (edited by Patricia Owens & Katharina Rietzler)