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9781909747166

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Her account of her personal struggles vacillates between self-deprecation and absolute confidence in the rectitude of her actions. It is abundantly clear that she was a very formidable woman. There is a quiet restraint in her description of the barriers she faced individually but she is keen to illustrate her refusal to compromise her commitment to women's right to participate in intellectual and public life on an equal footing with men. It is not always clear who she imagined the audience of her memoir to be; she defends the suffragettes and suffragists actions in a tone that feels directed to a somewhat less than sympathetic ear. One can imagine that as the first woman professor in the UK she must have become highly skilled at attenuating her arguments to win over her male colleagues and it seems to me that in part the memoir is engaged in a dialogue with them. Dr Rosie Campbell, Reader in Politics at Birkbeck, University of London. When the first professors at the new University College at Reading were designated in 1907, Morley was left off the list of those honoured. Her description of the controversy is instantly recognisable, even now. She thought that her achievements were not quite up to the honour of a chair; but when she realised that she was the only 'lecturer in charge of a subject' who was not to be made professor, she took a certain fire in her soul - and refused to stay in her post unless she was 'promoted'. It remains a credit to the new University at Reading that it broke convention and gave Morley a chair. It is perhaps even more of a credit to Morley herself that she stood up to those conventions and claimed the recognition due to her. She would no doubt be disheartened to discover that - more than a century later - her female successors in the academy are still sometimes struggling to win their due rewards. Professor Mary Beard Edith Morley broke new ground. Despite decades of social progress, her fight for recognition and equality with her male colleagues still strikes a chord with women in academia today. Her story motivates and inspires us to lead, and not simply follow, social change. Sir David Bell, Vice-Chancellor, University of Reading. Remarkable - Mandy Garner, workingmums.co.uk

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Born in Bayswater in 1875, Edith Morley 'did hate being a girl', though she found the middle-class conventions of the day restrictive rather than repressive and benefited from a good education thanks to her surgeon-dentist father and well-read mother. She obtained an 'equivalent' degree from Oxford University (the only type available to the few female students at the time) and was appointed Professor of English Language at University College, Reading, in 1908, becoming the first female professor in England. She is best known as the primary twentieth-century editor of Henry Crabb Robinson's writings (the author of a comprehensive biography) and for her Women Workers in Seven Professions: A Survey of their Economic Conditions and Prospects (1914), published while she was a member of the Fabian Executive Committee. Before and After, written in 1944 a few years after leaving the post at Reading, was 'intended to relate my experiences to the background of my period and to portray incidents in the life of a woman born in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.' She was made a member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1950, for her work setting up the Reading Refugee Committee and assisting Belgian Jewish refugees in World War II. She died in 1964.

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