Edith Morley Before and After: Reminiscences of a Working Life

Edith Morley (1875-1964) was a scholar and the main 20th century editor of the works of Henry Crabb Robinson. She was the first woman appointed to a chair at an English university-level institution. Born into a middle-class Victorian family, she hated being a girl, but a forward-thinking home life and a good education enabled her to overcome prejudices and become Professor of English Language at University College, Reading, in 1908. An early feminist with a strong social conscience, she ‘fought… with courage… and passionate sincerity for human rights and freedom.’ Covering the vividly described era of her late Victorian childhood, her student days with the increasing freedoms they brought, the early feminist movement, the growing pains of a new university and, much later, the traumas endured by refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, this absorbing memoir brings alive a very different era, one foundational to the freedoms we enjoy today. 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’, Edith Morley’s 1944 memoir, Before and After, was written a few years after her retirement.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1. Childhood backgroundChapter 2. Home lifeChapter 3. External conditionsChapter 4. Education and emancipationChapter 5. First years of professional workChapter 6. Other interestsChapter 7. Reading: College and UniversityChapter 8. Social and political activitiesChapter 9. The last chapterChapter 10.Epilogue

About the Author :
Born in Bayswater in 1875, Edited Morley 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 the United Kingdom. She is best known as the primary twentieth-century editor of Henry Crabb Robinson's writings 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 was written after her retirement in 1940. She was awarded an OBE in 1950 for her work in setting up the Reading Refugee Committee and assisting Jewish refugees in World War II. She died in 1964.

Review :
“Before and After is a poignant first-person account by a pioneering feminist who struggled for recognition in her academic life, and her story will resonate with many female academics today.”   THE review