Mary Ann Evans, aged 30. Photo: Painted by Alexandre-Louis-François d’Albert-Durade.
More Quaker than Quaker? Jonathan Wooding on George Eliot
‘Maggie learns to trust that “supreme Teacher… waiting to be heard” within her own imagination.’
In 1873, Sarah Woodhead, a Quaker, became the first woman to pass the Cambridge University Mathematical Tripos exam. She was one of five ‘pioneers’ at The College for Women, at Benslow House in Hitchin, founded in 1869 by Barbara Bodichon, Emily Davies, and a raft of sympathetic Quaker families. This ‘infidel’ educational establishment was to become Girton College, Cambridge (built by Quaker architect, Alfred Waterhouse). In 1868, Bodichon’s close friend, the novelist George Eliot (born Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880) had made a significant and – being herself a scandalous woman – anonymous contribution to her friend’s appeal to found what she herself had not been able to enjoy, a Cambridge University college for women.
