She was born, in 1832, at Hauxwell, in Yorkshire, a small village on the slope of a hill, looking towards the moors and Wensleydale. Her father was the clergyman of the village, and one of her brothers was the Rev. Mark Pattison, the well-known scholar and the Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford. Dorothy Pattison was first roused to wish for something more than the ordinary occupations of a young lady’s life by the enthusiasm felt throughout England in 1856 for Miss Florence Nightingale’s work in the Crimea. Dorothy wished to join Miss Nightingale’s band of lady nurses at the seat of war, but her parents’ opposition and her own want of training prevented her from carrying out this wish. From this time, however, she fretted against the life of comparative inactivity to which she was restricted so long as she remained in her village home. Some years were passed (wasted, we well may think) in unnecessary friction between herself and her father, she desiring to leave home, and he opposing her wishes in this respect. At last she did leave, in 1861, more or less in face of her father’s opposition; he declined to make her any allowance beyond what he had been accustomed to give her for pocket-money and clothes, and she had therefore to live partly on what she was able to earn. She obtained work as a village schoolmistress at Little Woolston, near Bletchley, and lived for three years in a small cottage, quite alone, without even a servant; her life at this time must have been very much like that described in _Jane Eyre_, where the heroine gains her livelihood for a time by similar work. She showed, as a village schoolmistress, that keen sympathy with children and power over them which always distinguished her. She could enter, through her bright imagination, into the feelings and thoughts of children, and her playfulness and love of fun made her a real friend and companion to them. At Little Woolston, too, she did a good deal of amateur nursing for the parents and friends of her little pupils. Her biographer, Miss Lonsdale,[5] says that the people in the neighbourhood of the village were very quick to discover that the new schoolmistress was a real lady, but for some time they could not get over their astonishment if they found Miss Pattison blacking her own grate when they came to see her. She was, perhaps, the first instance they had come across of a cultivated woman who thought that “being a lady” was not inconsistent with working hard. Dirtiness, untidiness, and muddle vex the soul of the “real lady” far more than doing the work which produces cleanliness and order.