Rethinking Inadequacy: Constance Maynard and Victorian Autobiography

Abstract

In 1881 two women who were to become part of the history of Victorian feminism met: Constance Maynard (1849–1935), graduate of one of the first cohorts of women to enter Girton College and founder in 1882 of Westfield College for Women, and Bessie Rayner Parkes Belloc (1829–1925), friend of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the “Langham Place” group of feminists, and former editor of the feminist English Women's Journal. In 1873 Maynard became the first woman in England to receive a degree in “moral sciences,” from Girton, and subsequently worked for six years as a headmistress and schoolmistress at two groundbreaking girls' schools, Cheltenham Ladies' College and the new St. Leonard's School in Scotland. When she met Belloc, she was living in London with her brother, taking art classes at the Slade School, and beginning discussions that would lead to the foundation of Westfield College, formed as an explicitly Evangelical-identified parallel to ecumenical Girton and also as the first college to prepare women for the examinations and degrees offered by the University of London.