In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Editorial Methods This collection of letters,written by Emily Davies between  and ,represents the years of her greatest involvement in a number of public issues.These were the years in which she was most prolific, corresponding with many of the most prominent English men and women of her time.The broad categories into which her correspondence falls chart her involvement in the activities of the Langham Place Circle: the editing of the English Woman’s Journal (EWJ); the opening of Cambridge Local Examinations to girls;the campaigns of the female suffrage movement and the London School Board;and the founding of the first college for women at Cambridge. By , Davies had achieved her great ambition of building the first residential college for women in England, Girton College. In that year she resigned from the position of Mistress, and in  she resigned from her position as secretary to the college. Davies’s correspondence lessened considerably once she withdrew from the administration and governing of the college. Few of these letters have been published before now, and this book represents the first attempt to gather together her correspondence. Emily Davies did not write an autobiography. However, between  and  she compiled a record of her achievements for her nephews in a six hundred-page manuscript that she titled the “Family Chronicle.”This manuscript includes many extracts from letters and articles,and Davies clearly compiled it with reference to the letters that were subsequently given to Girton College.Though the Chronicle is a very valuable source, it has not been published. Where scholars have heretofore cited letters by Davies,they have invariably transcribed extracts included in Barbara Stephen’s Emily Davies and Girton College (). Stephen’s biography was completed with the cooperation of Girton College and charts Davies’s efforts to found and build the college. Stephen relied on papers held at Girton, papers that reflect only Davies’s public life. The Stephen biography does not attempt to recreate events from her childhood and youth; rather, it is a straightforward reconstruction of her professional concerns. Our comparison of extracts from the Davies letters cited in the Stephen biography with our completed collection of letters made apparent that Stephen had quoted from letters written by Davies between  and  that are no longer extant.Our inquiries revealed that these letters—together with one hundred additional pages of the Family Chronicle—have been missing from the Girton College Archives since the biography was completed in . It was therefore necessary for us to decide whether or not to include nonextant extracts from the Stephen biography.We created a census of all extracts in the Stephen book (see appendices A, B, and C).The census indicates that Stephen included  extracts from letters that no longer exist.Some of these are fragments (a line or two),and some comprise several sentences.It is probable that they were taken from about eighty letters in all.Thirty-five extracts were to the Mannings, and twenty-three were to Anna Richardson, close personal friends of Davies. We considered that the loss of these letters would greatly impoverish the reader’s sense of Davies’s personal voice, and we made a thorough search for the missing papers. When our attempts to trace these letters were unsuccessful,we considered the relative merits of including the extracts printed in the Stephen biography. We decided that,as our edition of Davies’s letters comprises only autograph letters that we have transcribed, Stephen’s extracts from the missing letters could not be included in the main body of this book (though all the extant letters used by Stephen are contained within this volume).On a total of seventy-nine pages of the Stephen biography,there are citations from the missing letters within this time period (–).1 Had the Stephen biography been scrupulously accurate in its use of Davies’s papers, there might have been some argument for the inclusion of the extracts from what was, after all, a sizable cache of papers. However , inaccuracies within the Stephen biography called its reliability into question .The errors in the Stephen biography are often small,but they are misleading for scholars (see appendix C). For example, Stephen ascribes to Davies an article titled “Female Physicians” (EWJ, May ). There was no such article: Davies had merely published together in the journal a number of letters on the theme.Stephen ascribes to Davies an article titled“On the Influence upon Girls’ Schools of External Examinations” (London Student, May ).This article is...

Share