It is at this point that the engaged discussions aroused by the book under review move to heated argument. Maxine Berg is not afraid to tilt against the canon. J.P.Kenyon, David Cannadine, Peter Clarke, Donald Coleman are all indicted for offering gendered interpretations of the development of the discipline. Anger moves to irritation with David Cannadine. Nothing particularly contentious here.
Facts are, after all, facts.
Yet Cannadine's ultimate sin in his biography of Trevelyan, which is particularly poignant to the biographer of Power, is not his facts. Trevelyan had a wife, Janet Penrose Ward, who like many other academic wives of the period, acted as a kind of unacknowledged assistant to her husband. Cannadine appears to acq uiesce with the view that her role was little more than an extension of her household and family duties. Berg is particularly sensitive to this as her problem is exactly the reverse. Eileen Power's memory is inextricably tied up with that of her famous husband, M.M.Postan.