Elizabeth Wordsworth


Dame Elizabeth Wordsworth was founding Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford and she funded and founded St Hugh's College. She wrote significantly including, sometimes, under the name Grant Lloyd. She was the great-niece of the poet William Wordsworth. She was the daughter of Christopher Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln. Her brothers were John Wordsworth, Bishop of Salisbury, and Christopher Wordsworth, a liturgical scholar.

Life

Wordsworth was born in 1840 at Harrow on the Hill and she was educated at home, she learned several modern languages as well as 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. Her mother was Susanna Hatley Frere and her father Christopher Wordsworth was a headmaster and later the Bishop of London. 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.
She was the founding Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford in 1879 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. She received an honorary M.A. from Oxford in 1921 and an honorary D.C.L. in 1928.
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, and Ebb and Flow, under the pseudonym of Grant Lloyd. She wrote a song "Good and Clever", which like her books came out of copyright in 2002.

Works include