Cambridge (England) -- Pictorial works; University of Cambridge -- Pictorial works
included a students’ house where women from a distance could be lodged.
Two students applied in the autumn term of 1870 for permission to reside
in Cambridge, and were received into private houses in the town.
Meanwhile in response to an appeal, originating with Mrs. Fawcett,
exhibitions of £40 for two years for students attending the lectures had
been given by John Stuart Mill and Helen Taylor, and before the year
closed it was found necessary to open a house of residence. In March
1871 the post of head of a house of residence was offered to Miss Anne
J. Clough.
[Sidenote: Anne Clough.]
We know more about Miss Clough than about any founder or first principal
of a college on which he or she left a personal mark. Of the life and
thoughts of others, with the exception perhaps of Bateman in the xiv
century and Fisher in the xvith, we know singularly little. Anne J.
Clough was born on January 20, 1820, at Liverpool. Through her Newnham
received, what Girton missed, the impress of a strong individuality, now
placed by “great death” at a distance which enables us to focus and
appraise it. Her father’s family was of Welsh origin and traced itself
to that Sir Richard who was agent to the great merchant-adventurer, Sir
Thomas Gresham. To her Yorkshire mother, Anne Perfect, she and her
brother, the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, owed their literary interests. In
appearance she was of middle height and spare--an old woman of that
Victorian epoch in which she was born, out of whose eyes looked the soul
of the twentieth century, and after. She seemed indeed to have two
personalities--the white hair and an uncertain gait typified the one,
but the eyes, very dark and very bright, would lift unexpectedly in the
midst of a conversation, and then the visitor would receive a
revelation; he would see no more the old woman but the woman who must
always be young, the stamp of an inexhaustible energy, that shrewdness
with an unconquerable idealism close behind, an atmosphere about her of
uncouth poetry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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