LIVING PROOF by MICHAEL GEARIN-TOSH

Author:MICHAEL GEARIN-TOSH
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SCRIBNER
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

The young Janet got into Oxford as a student only at the fourth attempt. She was dyslexic, which may have held her back. When she was a student one of her contemporaries said that it was impossible to invite her to a party because she was always in tweeds. She acted, wrote poetry and she was awarded a first in Physiology in 1922.

When Janet Vaughan was twenty-six, Virginia Woolf, who was a cousin of her father, described her as “good, dull Janet Vaughan.” Some dullness … (It may be noted that Virginia Woolf changed her opinion, fractionally, two years later. She wrote in her diary for 1928 that Janet Vaughan “is an attractive woman; competent, disinterested, taking blood tests all day to solve some abstract problem.”)

I have not associated Christian with Janet Vaughan. But I start to see Christian’s spirit in what has been written about Dame Janet.

In a memorial address, Barbara Harvey, a former colleague, gave this memory:

She was accessible and exhilarating. Of course, we noticed that she was partial, but I suppose that we learnt to take this in our stride. It was exhilarating to have a Principal who made no secret of her own views, however controversial. Although we half smiled, as I think she did too, at her expressed conviction that a Somervillian put down anywhere in the world, in any situation, whatever the odds, would know how to cope, many of us left Oxford wondering whether there might not, after all, be something in the idea … Few heads of houses can have exerted more influence over their societies than she did over hers.

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