Harriet Shaw Weaver

Who was Harriet Shaw Weaver?

Harriet Shaw Weaver was a political activist and a magazine editor. She also became the patron of James Joyce.

Harriet Shaw Weaver was born in Frodsham, Cheshire, the daughter of Frederic Poynton Weaver, a doctor, and Mary Wright, who had inherited a fortune from her father. She was educated privately by a governess, initially in Cheshire and later in Hampstead. Her parents denied her wish to go to university and she decided to embark on social work. After attending a course on the economic basis of social relations at the London School of Economics she became involved in women's suffrage and joined the Women's Social and Political Union.

In 1911 she began subscribing to The Freewoman: A Weekly Feminist Review, a radical periodical edited by Dora Marsden and Mary Gawthorpe. The following year its proprietors withdrew their support from it and Weaver stepped in to save it from financial ruin. In 1913 it was renamed The New Freewoman. Later that year at the suggestion of the magazine's literary editor, Ezra Pound, the name was changed again to The Egoist. During the following years Weaver made more financial donations to the periodical, becoming more involved with its organisation and also becoming its editor.