Elizabeth Wordsworth

Dame Elizabeth Wordsworth DBE (1840–1932) was founding Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford and she funded and founded St Hugh's College. She was also an author, sometimes writing under the name Grant Lloyd. She was the great-niece of the poet William Wordsworth.

Elizabeth Wordsworth
Dame Elizabeth Wordsworth in 1928
Born(1840-06-22)22 June 1840
Harrow on the Hill, London, England
Died30 November 1932(1932-11-30) (aged 92)
Oxford, England
Pen nameGrant Lloyd
OccupationCollege leader, founder and writer
NationalityBritish
SubjectBiography

Life
Principal and Fellows of Lady Margaret Hall

Wordsworth was born in 1840 at Harrow on the Hill and she was educated at home, she learned several modern languages as well as (self taught) Latin and Greek though her knowledge of science and mathematics was meagre. She had a "persevering familiarity" with the Greek testament, as well as the Iliad, which she read at the rate of fifty lines a day with the help of a Latin translation.[1]:55 Her mother was Susanna Hatley Frere and her father Christopher Wordsworth was a headmaster and later the Bishop of London. Her brothers were John Wordsworth, Bishop of Salisbury, and Christopher Wordsworth, a liturgical scholar. She travelled on European family trips and she was brought up in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey and in Stanford in the Vale in Berkshire.[2]

She was the founding Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford in 1879[3] as a college for female undergraduates, on Norham Gardens in North Oxford. In 1886 she inherited some money from her father and founded St Hugh's College also in north Oxford as a college for poorer female undergraduates. Today this is one of the largest colleges in Oxford University. In 1896 she was one of the women who was called to give evidence to the Hebdomadal Council on the question of whether women should be awarded degrees at the University of Oxford, making her one of the first women to appear before this council.[1]:107 She believed that women's education at Oxford should be as close to that of men as possible, although she did not believe in their being entered for University prizes, due to the risk of overstimulation.[1]:107 She received an honorary M.A. from Oxford in 1921 and an honorary D.C.L. in 1928.[2]

She was a prolific author, writing poetry, plays, biographies and religious articles, as well as writing and lecturing on women's education. She published the novels Thornwell Abbas, (two volumes, 1876)[4] and Ebb and Flow, (two volumes, 1883) under the pseudonym of Grant Lloyd. She wrote a song "Good and Clever",[5] which like her books came out of copyright in 2002.

Works include
  • Thornwell Abbas, (two volumes, 1876)[6]
  • Ebb and Flow, (two volumes, 1883)
  • Christopher Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln, 1807-1885, with John Henry Overton, (1888)[7]
  • William Wordsworth, (1891)[8]

See also

Madeleine Shaw Lefevre, Wordsworth's counterpart at Somerville Hall.

Further reading

Olivia Robinson and Alison Moulds published " Women in Oxford's History: Elizabeth Wordsworth" in 2016[4]

References
  1. Brittain, Vera (1960). The Women at Oxford. London: George G Harrap & Co ltd.
  2. Lannon, Frances (2004). "Wordsworth, Dame Elizabeth (1840–1932)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 9 May 2010.
  3. Olivia Robinson, Alison Moulds (19 October 2016), Women in Oxford's History: Elizabeth Wordsworth, retrieved 10 May 2020
  4. Wordsworth, Dame Elizabeth (1876). Thornwell Abbas. S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington.
  5. "Good and Clever". www.bachlund.org. Retrieved 10 May 2020.
  6. Wordsworth, Dame Elizabeth (1876). Thornwell Abbas. S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington.
  7. Overton, John Henry; Wordsworth, Dame Elizabeth (1888). Christopher Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln, 1807-1885. Rivingtons.
  8. Wordsworth, Dame Elizabeth (1891). William Wordsworth. Percival and Company.
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