Margaret Cole
| Dame Margaret Cole | |
|---|---|
| Born | Margaret Isabel Postgate 6 May 1893 United Kingdom |
| Died | 7 May 1980 (aged 87) United Kingdom |
| Occupation | Writer, politician |
| Alma mater |
Roedean School Girton College, Cambridge |
| Genre | Mystery, biography |
| Relatives |
John Percival Postgate (father) Edith Allen (mother) Raymond Postgate (brother) |
Dame Margaret Isabel Cole, DBE (née Postgate; 6 May 1893 – 7 May 1980) was an English socialist politician and writer.
Daughter of John Percival Postgate and Edith (née Allen) Postgate, Margaret was educated at Roedean School and Girton College, Cambridge. While at Girton, through her reading of H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and others, she came to question the Anglicanism of her upbringing and to embrace atheism, socialism and feminism.
Upon successfully completing her course (Cambridge did not allow women to graduate formally until 1947), Margaret became a classics teacher at St. Paul's Girls' School. Her poem The Falling Leaves, a response to the First World War, and currently on the OCR English Literature syllabus at GCSE, shows the influence of Latin poetry in its use of long and short syllables to create mimetic effects.
During World War I, her brother Raymond Postgate sought exemption from military service as a socialist conscientious objector, but was denied recognition and jailed for refusing military orders. Her support for her brother led her to a belief in pacifism. During her subsequent campaign against conscription, she met G. D. H. Cole, whom she married in 1918. The couple worked together for the Fabian Society before moving to Oxford in 1924, where they both taught and wrote. In the early 1930s, Margaret abandoned her pacifism in reaction to the suppression of socialist movements by the governments in Germany and Austria and to the events of the Spanish Civil War.
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