Before and After

<p>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 <em>Before and After</em> was written a few years after retiring as the first female professor at an English university.</p><p>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.’</p><p>Covering the vividly described setting 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.</p><p>'Every woman now working in British universities - or in any other profession for that matter - will recognise Edith Morley's story ... Quite simply she took on the establishment as feminists have done ever since.' From the Foreword by Professor Mary Beard</p>