to my new website and blog. I started this blog to explore the lives of university wives and women students who came to live in Cambridge at the end of the nineteenth century. The historian Christopher Brooke put it well when he described these women as ‘pioneers and settlers of a new territory’: as the first women to break into a highly traditional male university society, they formed close bonds of friendship.

In future blog posts I’ll investigate some of these women’s stories and their contributions to literature, women’s suffrage, mental and social welfare, higher education and more. This blog will be about wider networks too, revealing their connections to the world outside Cambridge, including Henry James, Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster.

To paraphrase the modern biographer Daisy Hay, let’s take those figures who have always been at the edge of the stage and shine a spotlight on them, to see what happens.