Kitty Muggeridge

Katherine Rosalind Muggeridge[1] (née Dobbs, born 8 December 1903 – 11 June 1994) was a British writer and translator.

She was born in Chateau d'Oex, Switzerland, where her parents, the former Rosalind Potter (Beatrice Webb's sister) and George Dobbs, were then living. Stafford Cripps was a cousin.[2] The family returned to England when hostilities in the Great War began and she attended Bedales School, and briefly, in her early 20s, the London School of Economics. In 1927 she married the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge,[3] and the couple eventually had three sons and a daughter.

With his wife, Muggeridge was posted to the Soviet Union in 1932 by the Manchester Guardian. Then admirers of the Bolsheviks, the couple described this as "a wondrous development",[1] but quickly became completely disillusioned when they saw what was happening in the country. Kitty's aunt, Beatrice Webb, who with her husband Sidney Webb, 1st Baron Passfield had recently defended the Soviet Union in their book Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?, called Muggeridge's Manchester Guardian articles "an hysterical tirade", but was more restrained in her private communications with the couple.[4]

With Ruth Adam, she wrote Beatrice Webb: A Life 1858-1943 (1967), which although more a memoir than a scholarly book, was positively reviewed at the time.[5] Her opinion of broadcaster David Frost dating from 1967, "he rose without a trace", has been much quoted over the years.[6]

Like her husband, she became an admirer of the Calcutta based nun Mother Teresa, about whom she wrote in a book entitled Bright Legacy (1983), a work published the year after the couple had become Catholics.[7] In this period she translated two books by Jean Pierre de Caussade,[2] the 18th century French Jesuit priest.

Following the death of her husband in 1990,[1] Kitty Muggeridge lived with her son John and daughter-in-law in Welland, Ontario, Canada, where she died in June 1994.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Albin Krebs "Malcolm Muggeridge, Writer, Dies at 87", New York Times, 15 November 1990. The Independent obituary (below) of Kitty Muggeridge aoppears to be the only source to identify her first name as 'Kathleen'.
  2. 1 2 Nicholas Flynn Obituary: Kitty Muggeridge, The Independent, 20 June 1994
  3. ↑ Ian Hunter Malcolm Muggeridge: A Life, Vancouver, BC: Regent College Publishing, 2003, p.26 (Originally published by Thomas Nelson in 1980.)
  4. ↑ Ian Hunter Malcolm Muggeridge: A Life, p.86
  5. ↑ See Denis Brogan "The trouble with aunt Bo", The Spectator, 10 November 1967, p.12 and Noel Annan "Do-Gooder", The New York Review of Books, 21 November 1968
  6. ↑ Stuart Jeffries Obituary: David Frost, The Guardian, 1 September 2013
  7. ↑ Karl Schmude "G.K. Chesterton and Malcolm Muggeridge: A balance of opposites", Catholic Education Resource Center
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