Swansea While in Swansea, Gallie met
Walter Bryce Gallie, a
Scottish philosophy lecturer. They were married in July 1940, a month after she had taken her finals and five days before her husband left to serve in the
Army during the
Second World War, after which he left with the rank of
Major and having been awarded the
Croix de Guerre. During the war Gallie worked for the
Inland Revenue in
Llandudno and
London. After the war her husband resumed his post as a philosophy lecturer in University College, Swansea and they moved, in her case returned to Ystradgynlais, where they had a son, Charles, and a daughter, Edyth. Gallie and her husband were committed to
democratic socialism and were
politically active. In the autumn of 1949,
A.D. Lindsay, the
Master of
Balliol College, Oxford, visited the Gallies in Swansea to tell them of his idea for a new university in
Keele in
North Staffordshire, the "University College of North Staffordshire" (the forerunner of
Keele University) and his wish for Bryce to be its professor of philosophy. Bryce Gallie recalled that Lindsay met Menna:
Keele The Gallies moved to Keele in the end of September 1950 for Bryce to take up the post as the "Professor of Philosophy" in the College. He recalled that when he arrived his relations with Lindsay, by now the
Principal of the College "were far from easy", the result of a combination of reasons, one of which comprised he husband described as the "political storms in the college grew more violent." He continued: "... Lindsay came to recognize that I was one of the handful of people he could trust .... This tardy recognition on his part helped our relationship, and during his last months he talked with me more and more. Quite as important, however, for the improvement in our relations was the part played by my wife." He explained: Gallie continued, on a lighter note:
Belfast In 1954 the Gallies moved to
Northern Ireland, where Bryce took up the post of Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at
Queen's University Belfast. While there they lived in the estate of
Castle Ward, an historic property outside
Belfast. During their stay, Gallie and her husband stayed in
New York for the academic year 1962-63, while he was the
visiting Professor of Philosophy at
New York University during the
Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1965, Gallie gave a speech to the
PEN society, the worldwide association of writers, in
Bled,
Slovenia (the former Yugoslavia) in her capacity as a delegate for Northern Ireland.
Cambridge The Gallies left Northern Ireland in 1967 upon Bryce's appointment as Professor of Political Science in
Peterhouse, Cambridge. In his history of British
intellectuals from World War II to
Thatcherism, Scottish
historian Colin Kidd referred to the 'suppressed cold war' which existed in
Oxbridge after
World War II 'between spouse and don, or between spouse and an different and demanding college' and that occasionally 'matters would erupt into the open.' He continued: Shortly afterwards, Gallie also wrote a critical review of
Germaine Greer's 1970 book,
The Female Eunuch, which was published in the
Cambridge Review. In it she took issue with her summation of Greer's conclusion that "Man is the enemy; so is the family and so is marriage" by citing "For God's sake hold your tongue and let me love", the first line of the poem
The Canonization, by
John Donne, the 17th century
metaphysical poet. Bryce retired in 1976. When he did so, the Gallies settled in their 'bolt hole' in
Newport,
Pembrokeshire, which they used when they were living in Ystradgynlais. ==Literary career==