Margaret Masson Hasluck

Margaret Hasluck (1885-1948) was a remarkable researcher, one of a number of women who travelled in the Balkans before the war, amongst them Edith Durham, who was rather older. Unlike Edith Durham, Margaret Hasluck was not of independent means, and came rather via the University of Aberdeen to Cambridge, where she studied with Jane Harrison. Jane Harrison sponsored her to become a student at the British School at Athens, which forced the school to decide whether or not women should be permitted to live there. Harrison won the battle by threatening to call a meeting of the subscribers (ie. its members) to the school, and Hasluck therefore went out to Athens where she promptly became engaged to, and then married Frederick Hasluck in 1912.

 

Margaret Hasluck was a redoubtable figure, with a reputation for being rather haughty. She never forgave A.J.B. Wace for his manoeuvring her husband out of the possible Directorship of the school, or for his arranging for his dismissal. Hasluck himself avoided any such controversy, and it does not appear to have effected their marriage – their surviving letters to each other are deeply affectionate. Tragically, Hasluck’s health began to fail shortly thereafter. He took up war-work in Athens nevertheless, for the British in counter-intelligence, and then when he became too ill to work Margaret accompanied him to Switzerland and nursed him until he died in 1920.

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After his death, she edited his published and unpublished articles scrupulously which became Christianity and Islam under the Sultans, and then also his letters to Dawkins, the director of the school at the time when Hasluck was Assistant Director. She then reapplied herself to fieldwork, moving to the Albanian supported by a travelling fellowship from Aberdeen, her old university. There she built herself a house and devoted herself to collecting material on Albanian village life. Unfortunately, she was then forced to leave by the incursion of the Italians into Albania, and the outbreak of the Second World War.

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During the war, she became a tutor to the SOE recruits in Cairo, teaching Albanian and Albanian affairs to those who were to be sent there. A firm opponent of communism, she eventually left the  SOE  when it was clear that the British were supporting the partisans as the most effective resistance against the Nazis. She continued to work temporarily in London, and then eventually moved to Cyprus where she died of blood cancer.

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During her life, she published a number of different short reports, articles and translations, as well as taking photographs and collecting ethnographic objects, particularly textiles. Additionally, however, before she died she put together a volume eventually entitled Unwritten Law in Albania, edited posthumously by Hutton that is truly remarkable. Clearly and carefully written, it lays out systemically the system of social order in the Albanian villages where she worked, and was instantly accepted as a piece of social anthropology of first-rate importance. One of the most fascinating aspects of this monograph is that her intellectual route to producing it is through classics, then thorough immersion in the field in the Balkans and Albania. She appears to have no active engagement with the emerging theory of social anthropology at the time. Be this as it may, she deserves her fame as a notable traveller, ethnographer, and then author of a key work in our field.

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References

Hasluck, F. W. 1925 Christianity and Islam under the Sultans, edited by Margaret Hasluck, two volumes, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Hasluck, F. W. 1926 Letters on Religion and Folklore, by the late F.W. Hasluck; annotated by Margaret M. Hasluck, London: Luzac & Co.

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Hasluck, M. 1954 The Unwritten Law in Albania, by the late Margaret Hasluck; edited by J.H. Hutton. Cambridge: CUP.

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Shankland, D. 2003 ‘Introduction’ in Archaeology, Anthropology and Heritage in the Balkans and Anatolia: the life and works of F.W. Hasluck, 1878-1920, Istanbul: Isis Press, Volume 1.