For one of the twentieth century’s most outstanding female philosophers, the intellectual and the domestic were inseparable: her home always open, with children, students, priests and dons wandering in and out of her tutorials
On Boxing Day 1941, Elizabeth Anscombe married Peter Geach in Brompton Oratory, London. Her brothers had instructed her to break off the engagement on the grounds that Peter was “absurd”, but she ignored their warnings. Her marriage certificate protected her from a new conscription act, passed that month, which applied to unmarried women between the ages of 20 and 30. Though now Mrs Geach, she would always be known as – and would insist on being known as – Miss Anscombe.
The pair of philosophers had met in 1938 at the Corpus Christi procession at the priory in Begbroke, a small village five miles north-west of Oxford. Both were recent converts and Geach’s religious rebirth had left him “in love with love” and desperately in need of “a girl to love and woo and marry”. Seeing a young woman approaching him after the service, under the impression she was someone else, he proposed to her. Anscombe’s account differed. She recalled Geach approaching her after the procession and, beginning to massage her shoulder, saying: “Miss Anscombe, I like your mind.” As neither tale is especially plausible, they are more likely in-jokes between two philosophers interested in personal identity. Depending on whose story you prefer, she either said “Yes” or, “And I, yours”.