Irene Cooper Willis (1882–1970)

IRENE COOPER WILLIS. June 19, 1882 - 1970
Writer, lawyer, feminist, peace activist
Irene Cooper Willis was the daughter of Ellen Irene Brook and Edward Cooper Willis, a London lawyer at 5 King's Bench Walk, Temple. Together with her twin sister Lynette (later Mrs. Hemmant) she attended Blackheath High School and from 1901 to 1904 Girton College, Cambridge; Irene and Lynette studied mathematics and graduated with a BA in 1904. Lynette married the lawyer Daniel Ground Hemmant in 1905, studied medicine at King's College and became a doctor specializing in venereology. Nothing concrete could be found about Irene's follow-up studies, but from 1924 she was a lawyer at the Inner Temple, London. Both had the address in 1946: 11 King's Bench Walk, Temple.

A friend, the writer Enid Bagnold, describes Irene as serious, shy and clever, very fair, beautiful with her dark hair that curled over the ears and was held together with combs. Irene campaigned for socialism, pacifism and feminism and, as a passionate war opponent, joined together with Vernon Lee, the Union of Democratic Control (UDC), founded in 1914, a group that criticized the government's war policies; she became a board member and worked closely with Helena Swanwick and Mary Agnes Hamilton; Another board member and founding member was Charles Philips Trevelyan, with whose family Irene was friends: the poet RC Trevelyan gave her dedication copies of his books, the historian George Macaulay Trevelyan was one of the founders of the British Institute in Florence, to which she later opened the library at Vernon Lee handed over.

From 1915 to 1919 she was a volunteer member of the British section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) under the presidency of Helena Swanwick and vice-presidency of Maude Royden, and in 1915 she was a member of the British Committee for the International Women's Congress in The Hague.

In 1911 Irene Vernon met Lee (Violet Paget) and until her death she was the companion and collaborator of the writer and intellectual who was known to be absorbing, dominant and contentious. Nevertheless, she kept her independence and pursued her path as an author and future lawyer.

In 1914, Lady Ottoline Morrell invited her friend Vernon Lee and Irene to dinner in Bedford Square and decided to free Irene from addiction to Vernon Lee with the help of her friend and lover Bertrand Russell. Against Vernon Lee's wishes, she became Russell's part-time assistant, doing research for his planned work "Principles and Practice in English Foreign Policy" in the British Museum, and scouring the old Times on Britain's diplomatic relations since 1906. After her sexually too close to Russell entered, Irene withdrew from both professional and private relationships.

In early 1924 she made the final exam for the Honorable Society of the Inner Temple, one of the four bar associations in England, and was admitted to the bar; she was successful in her profession and was deputy chairman of the administrative court from 1934 to 1945.

She was the lawyer and friend of the costume designer and suffragette Edith Ailsa Craig, daughter of actress Ellen Terry, who founded the Barn Theater on her Smallhythe Place estate in Kent after her mother's death.

Vernon Lee died in 1935 and Irene was the sole beneficiary and executor; she inherited the copyright and probably also that of Vernon Lee's half-brother Eugene Lee-Hamilton, who had died in 1907. In 1935 she donated over four hundred books, some of which were annotated, from Vernon Lee's library in the Villa Il Palmerino to the British Institute in Florence; Most of the estate went to Colby College (Waterville, Maine, USA), as Irene - after the wars in Europe - considered America to be a safe place to keep, parts of it went to Somerville College.

She became Thomas Hardy's executor in 1937 after the death of his second wife Florence - a friend of Irene - and gradually gave his estate to the Thomas Hardy Memorial Collection at the Dorset County Museum in Dorchester.

Between 1919 and 1921 Irene Cooper Willis wrote three analyzes of the First World War - how did it come about, how did we deal with it, how did we get away with it - which were later summarized in the volume "England's Holy War", dedicated to Vernon Lee, 1928 were.

She is also credited with having published the novel "The Green-Eyed Monster" with William Heinemann under the pseudonym Althea Brook in 1923, in which, inter alia, she published the novel "The Green-Eyed Monster". Bertrand Russell and Desmond MacCarthy perform.

Then she published several biographical works between 1927 and took care of the estate of Vernon Lee.
(translated from German)