Free Bluestockings by Jane Robinson

furniture.
    Two years later, the college moved again, this time to Newnham Hall, the nucleus of Sir Basil Champney’s purpose-built accommodation in the gracious, domestic style reminiscent of a Queen Anne country house. 2 Indeed, for all the new women’s colleges the suggestion of country-house ambience was quite deliberate. It was supposed to lend an air of well-ordered conviviality and social propriety to comfort the students and confound those who thought you might as well let cretins or criminals invade academia, as women.
    In the early days, not all of those who came up to college stayed the full three years. Options included living in while attending one or two series of lectures, and then leaving; working for a ‘pass’ or ‘ordinary’ degree (that is, a lower-calibre course), or buckling down to full honours – including, at Girton, ‘Little-Go’. It has been a feature of women students’ lives across the span of this book, however, that at any time the call might come from home to abandon the life of an intellectual sybarite and return to reality. As Anna Lloyd from Girton knew (whose sisters’ disapproval grew too strident to ignore), for women domestic duty was too often pitted against scholarship, and reputation against self-fulfilment. Welsh girl Dilys Lloyd Davies was another reluctant drop-out: she had gone up to study natural sciences atNewnham after a brief stint as pupil-teacher at her old school – Miss Buss’s North London Collegiate – in 1877.
    Dilys wrote letters home every Sunday, like everyone else, and hers shimmer with enthusiasm. She drew a careful plan of her room for her family. It had three chairs, a chest of drawers, a washstand, a curtained-off corner for hanging dresses, and a dressing table under the window next to her bed ‘with a snowy quilt’; she used her tin trunk for a bedside cabinet. Most of the college furniture was donated by well-wishers, or found by the Sidgwicks in antique shops around Cambridge. The wallpaper and curtains were riotously floral (mostly passionflowers), and clashed with the cheerful green and red carpet. At night, Dilys was kept awake by nightingales.
    The other students were fascinating. One was a thin girl whom Dilys was shocked to realize wore no petticoats.
    She is given just a little to manly or rather masculine movements of the lower limbs: sitting on tables now and then and spreading her feet out a little but I dare say she is nice… One or two are rather given that way.
    She found the ‘ladylike ones’ a great comfort. They did not gossip or use slang, and though they could be rather earnest and drab, at least they were safely conventional. The young men she saw at lectures looked equally fascinating; especially one who asked if he could walk along beside her. ‘That is against the rules, I find, but I didn’t know.’ He asked her and a chaperone to come on the river with him, but Miss Clough said it was out of the question, ‘so that’, Dilys wrote regretfully, ‘is the end of that’. 3
    Chaperones were an unavoidable feature of university life for women right through to the 1920s, and even, in some archaic cases, beyond. 4 They were married ladies or widowsengaged as guardians. Guardians against moral, perhaps physical, violation when students were out and about among undergraduates and university staff; and against moral, perhaps physical, turpitude if students were tempted to interact in any way with said risky gentlemen. In other words, they were paid to safeguard young women from themselves as much as others. Their presence was also a comfort to parents at home, worrying about their unprotected daughters at large in a man’s world. Chaperones were issued with cheap tickets to lectures where, having corralled their charges into a corner of the hall, they sat and noisily knitted. If a woman student wished to go to a concert (only with her college Principal’s permission, of course), to tea with family friends, to conduct an