Margaret Dewey SSM

Last week at the Library of the Community of the Holy Name we received a donation from the collection of Margaret Dewey SSM, recently departed. I had the somewhat giddy experience, for a librarian, of classifying some of Margaret's own books using the classification scheme invented by her grandfather.

When I say her ‘own books’ I mean books written by her. These tell their own story of Margaret’s life. The first was ‘The Messengers : a concise history of the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel’ (Mowbray, 1975). The USPG is one of the oldest missionary societies and her history tracks its rise and decline since the 18^th century. She herself worked in all different parts of the world – England, the Middle East, New Guinea, Australia – finding new challenges as she travelled. The other book was ‘Light from Within : Perspective on the Biblical Drama’ (Canterbury Press Norwich, 1993), which is, to quote the cover, “a new and imaginative approach to the Bible as the archetypal saga of how God works among and within people at different stages of their growth toward spiritual maturity.”

Margaret’s friend Diana Cherry delivered the donation to the Library, writing that some of the books though “will I suspect be of little value as Margaret had the habit of underlining, and sometimes annotating, what she read.  We have just had the Oblates’ retreat and I took one of her Martin Israel books — an early one I hadn’t read.  It would be easier to count the lines not thickly underlined than those she had marked!”  It is easy to make a decision about heavily marked books if a copy is already held, not so easy if the title is rare. The strengths of her collection for this Library are in Scripture, Church History, and the modern history of Israel-Palestine. But yes, thorough underlining in some books, indication of a thorough reader.

Margaret grew up in New York State before winning a scholarship to Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She moved to England, where she studied theology and ran a retreat house n Gloucestershire, before coming to Australia. She was for five years principal of Janet Clarke Hall in the University of Melbourne (1959-1963). Diana continues: “Margaret had many, many books.  When she arrived at JCH in 1959 it was with several trunks of books, and these were added to over the years.  In the following decades, many were well travelled across the oceans!   When she lived at the SSM Priory at Diggers’ Rest, most found their way into the library and she had only a couple of book cases in her room.   When the Priory was closed and Margaret moved to the Mercy apt. in Parkville, she kept the books she valued most.  And then it was down-sizing again when she moved to Mercy Place in East Melbourne.  The boxes I took to CHN contain most of those books.”

Margaret joined the Society of the Sacred Mission when the rules changed and women could be professed. She was the third woman to become a full member of SSM. Her many jobs included managing the Society’s library at Willen Priory, so librarianship was passed on in the family. She edited its newsletter, organised its archives and papers, and published the works of SSM’s founder, Father Herbert Kelly. His works are well represented in this collection. But just in case you think all of this defines Margaret in time and space, she is quoted on the SSM website as saying, “I could also have been with the Jesuits or the Quakers and would have lived quite happily with either.”