The Skeleton Army by Alis Hawkins

Author:Alis Hawkins [Hawkins, Alis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 37

Non

Basil and I had agreed not to wait until Lucy Ayott had finished work to go and see her. Cooper’s, like most of the shops in town, would be open early so we could catch her on her way to work.

But that decision meant that I’d slept lightly, and by a quarter to five I was wide awake. I got up and dressed quietly. With the final examinations less than a week away, I had plenty of work to do, though, to be honest, I was spending more time on my article for the Pall Mall Gazette than I was on plane algebra or Georg Cantor’s new set theory.

Before starting to write my piece about Mary Somerville and her heirs in Oxford, I’d read Somerville’s autobiography, Personal Recollections, in search of some nice, neat comparisons with the ‘Somervillians’. But reading that made me realise how different Mary Somerville’s life had been from the lives of the young women who lived in the hall named after her, and how easily she might have failed to become famous.

If her first husband hadn’t died three years after they married, it seemed very unlikely to me that Mary Somerville would have had any kind of mathematical career at all. In her own words, Samuel Greig ‘possessed in full the prejudice against learned women which was common at that time’. But, of course, she’d got married because she wasn’t financially independent, so marriage had been the only course open to her. It was only as a wealthy widow that she’d been able to pursue her own interests.

Luckily for her, her second husband had been a different kettle of fish. William Somerville had been a member of the Royal Society and he’d encouraged her in her studies and her writing.

But how many William Somervilles were there to the pound? Not many. Men were mostly Samuel Greigs. Which was why women like Annie Rogers and Eleanor Smith chose not to marry.

‘Not to mention women like Lizzie Lyall,’ Hara chipped in.

‘The article’s about Somerville students.’

‘Then maybe it should just be about women in Oxford.’

Could I stretch the article to include a Salvation Army officer? It wasn’t what I’d been asked for, but it might be a more interesting piece.

When I thought about it, Lizzie Lyall was a more independent and free-thinking woman than any of the Somerville girls. She’d moved to a different city, on her own, unchaperoned, to pursue her calling. She commanded men and she made decisions which affected the lives of thousands of people, directly or indirectly.

And she didn’t stick to the rules of what people thought a respectable woman should be. She danced at meetings. She preached with enormous passion – no middle-class reticence and demureness there. Lizzie Lyall was vividly herself and felt no shame about being that person. Granted, that was probably because of the Salvationist view that men and women were equal before God, but still, she wasn’t asking anybody’s permission to be who she was and do what she wanted.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.