Amber Reeves

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Amber Reeves (1 July 1887 - 26 December 1981) was a feminist writer and scholar, daughter of New Zealand politician and social reformer William Pember Reeves and Maud Pember Reeves, a noted Fabian feminist.

1 Early Life
2 Cambridge
3 Relationship with H.G Wells
4 Family and writings
5 References

[edit] Early Life

Amber Reeves attended Kingston High School until 1904 and then traveled to Europe to become fluent in French. He father was not fully converted to the higher education of women and he gave her the choice between being presented at court and going to Cambridge, she chose Cambridge and began studying at Newnham College in 1905. It is unlikely her father raised further opposition as he always spoke highly of Amber's academic achievements. <ref name=fry>Maude & Amber, Ruth Fry, University of Canterbury Press, 1992. pp.35, 44-51</ref>

[edit] Cambridge

While at Cambridge Amber began to associate with other young women who shared her intellectual enthusiasms and socialist political leanings, forming a lifelong friendship with Eva Spielmann (later a well known educationalist). She became involved in a number of societies, including the debating society. In 1907 she led the inter-collegiate debate with Gilton arguing that "the socialist conception of life if the most noble and the most fruitful, both for the state and the individual" In 1906 she founded the Cambridge University Fabian Society (CUFS) with Ben Keeling, a member of the (somewhat inactive) existing Fabian society in the town. CUFS was the first society at Cambridge to enlist women from its founding. Young women met regulary with men as equals and discussed everything from religious beliefs, to social evils to sex. Something which would have been impossible in the conventional atmospheres of their homes. She excelled academicly, Gilbert Murray once wrote of an address she had given to the Newnham Philosophical Society "It seems to me quite the best college paper that I have read- I mean as treated by a young personand from a non-metaphysical point of view" and a fellow student described her as "intellect personified" after a lecture she gave to the Philosophical Society. <ref name=fry />

[edit] Relationship with H.G Wells

H.G. Wells had been a friend of Amber's parents and one of the most popular speakers to address the CUFS. After Amber's address to the Philosophical Society it was rumoured that her and Wells had gone to Paris together for a weekend. Their appearence together at a supper party thrown for well known Fabian and Governor of Jamaica Sir Sydney Olivier was the first open declaration of the romantic relationship between the pair. Wells claimed that Amber responded to his taste for adventurous eroticism, and the "sexual imaginativess" that his wife Jane could not cope with. Wells maintained that their relationship be kept silent, though Amber saw no reason their exciting affair be kept a secret. Once their relationship became well known there were numerous attempts to break it up, particularly from Amber's mother and lawyer George Rivers Blanco White (who would later become Ambers husband).

Amber was anxious not to break up Wells's marriage, though she wanted to have his child. The news that she was pregnant in the spring of 1909 shocked the Reeves family, and the couple fled to Le Touquet where they attempted domestic life together. Neither of them did well with domesticity, loneliness and anxiety concerning her pregnancy, as well as the complexity of the situation drove Amber to depression, and after three months they decided to leave Le Touquet. Wells took Amber to Boulogne and put her on the ferry to England, while he stayed to continue his writing.<ref name=fry />

[edit] Family and writings

In 1909 she bore a daughter, Anna-Jane, to H.G. Wells, but later married George Rivers Blanco White, Q.C., by whom she had another two children, Thomas and Justin. Her daughter Justin, who married the biologist Conrad Hal Waddington, is the mother of mathematician Dusa McDuff.

Amber Reeves published four novels and four non-fiction works, dealing with a variety of subjects, but all sharing a common socialist and feminist critique of capitalist society. These include: