Emily Davies: Collected Letters, 1861-1875

Introduction

Introduction Sarah Emily Davies (–) was at the heart of critical political,educational, journalistic,and social reform movements of mid-nineteenth-century England. Between ,when she arrived in London,and ,when she retired as Mistress of Girton College,Davies was an active member of the Langham Place Circle ;edited both the EnglishWoman’s Journal and the Victoria;launched campaigns to open the Cambridge Local Examinations to girls and to request that the Taunton Commission (SIC) include girls’ schools in its investigations; helped form the London Association of Schoolmistresses and the Kensington Society; organized the first campaign for women’s suffrage in ; served on the London School Board;and founded Girton College,Cambridge University,the first residential college of higher education for women. She was an essential part of a movement that transformed her society:at her birth in ,England held only four universities,and none was open to women.At her death in , the twelve universities in the country were all open to women. At her birth in , women’s suffrage was a barely discussed and entirely marginal possibility;before she died, however, Davies cast a vote in one of the first elections open—albeit still only in partial and incomplete form—to women. The impressive scope and range of her activities make it all the more puzzling that, in the seventy-five years since Barbara Stephen published her biography of Davies, Emily Davies and Girton College, only one book-length study of Davies has been written,in contrast to numerous works on Davies’s colleague and friend Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon.2 Furthermore,much scholarly recognition of Emily Davies locates her implicitly beneath Bodichon in significance or depicts her simply as one of the less colorful and charismatic members of the larger Victorian feminist world known as the Langham Place Circle.3 Even the recent generation of feminist scholarship and history, in seeking to identify“lost”Victorian feminists,has been misleadingly campaign specific in depicting Emily Davies, concentrating quite narrowly on particular efforts in which Davies was involved—to open the Cambridge Local Examinations to girls, for example, or to launch the women’s suffrage struggle, or to found Girton College.4 While these studies have been valuable in locating Davies in the context of Victorian feminism,their issue-specific focus has not fostered a fuller exploration of the important relationships among these reform campaigns and has at times obscured our understanding both of the shaping power of Davies’s strategizing in an array of closely connected feminist efforts and of the extraordinary range and scope of her work. This striking lack of full recognition for her achievements may be due, ironically, at least in part to Davies’s remarkable success in destroying all of her personal documents and correspondence. For example, Davies met Elizabeth Garrett in ,when Davies was only twenty-four,and the two remained close friends and allies for all of their lives, yet not one letter from Davies to Garrett Anderson remains.5 Thus,while occasional references in her published writings suggest that Davies thought long and hard—indeed angrily and rebelliously— about the role of women in her society, we have no extant letters written before ,when she was thirty-one,and no early letters directly expressing those rebellious feelings or depicting the evolution of her early feminist thought.6 Finally,we know that in ,at the age of seventy-five,Davies wrote what she called a Family Chronicle,a manuscript that begins by recording some family history and then turns to a depiction of her own political activities from  to .This document is essentially a compilation of family genealogies and a transcription of correspondence on political and reform issues with a thread of connective narrative explanation that erases as much as it describes and that does not illuminate our knowledge of the younger Davies or of the world that shaped her.The loss of some one hundred pages of the Family Chronicle that recorded her life between  and  further reduces the contribution of this work to our knowledge of Davies.7 Barbara Stephen opens her  biography of Emily Davies with the explanation that Davies, at her death, had left among her papers a memorandum expressing her hope that no memoir “of an intimate personal nature” would be written of her, and adding her conviction that “there are not materials for [such a memoir]”().However,Davies apparently added,she did think it would be “reasonable that some information . . . be [made...