ABSTRACT
After a four-year gap Clara recommenced her diary in 1890. She wrote that ‘The real failure of the last three years has hardened me in many ways. I have burnt my ships; I do not regret it; but I doubt whether I should have done it if I had known what it would be.’1 To the outsider assessing her work during the years 1887-90 she appears to have been very productive. She continued studying pure mathematics at University College from 1886-87 and 1888-89; she organised and ran several series of lectures; undertook her own independent surveys and made her important contribution to Booth’s volumes. What can she have meant by ‘failure’? It is most likely that she referred to her failure to find a permanent well-paid position. She said herself, later in the same entry:
This investigating work has many drawbacks and just now I feel thoroughly unnerved by the expectation of pin pricks. I would give it up and will give it up whenever I see a chance of earning a certain £60 even by lecturing on economics. Not that I do not like the work when it is done or that I do not feel a kind of enjoyment in the risk involved in facing unknown people but although I enjoy the personal contact with so many people I should never see otherwise, the work leaves no roots behind.
