Biographies

Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick 1845-1936

Nora (as she was usually known) was born into a landed Scottish family with close aristocratic and political connections: her beloved brother Arthur became Prime Minister eventually. In her twenties she was the chatelaine of three great houses. Educated at home, she had prolonged tuition in mathematics for which she had a particular genius. After marrying Henry Sidgwick (the great Cambridge reformer and exponent of women’s education – he had helped found Newnham), she became Vice-Principal as well as doing the mathematical teaching, while they both lived in what is now Sidgwick Hall. They were the happy centre of of much lively Cambridge and London life and their friends and family spilled over into College. After Miss Clough’s death, Nora became Principal and they lived in the new Pfeiffer building, continuing their successful companionable marriage of an unusual Victorian Kind, both engaged in different work but with a major occupation apart from the academic world: the Society for Psychical Research, founded by Henry in 1882. A joint struggle for them was for the admission of women to University examinations (won) and to degrees (lost).

Newnham’s finances, to which she contributed generously herself, were entirely in Nora’s hands. She encouraged research for the intellectual health of the College and greatly helped to create its especial ethos. An insistence on both hard work and conformist lady-like behaviour was in keeping with her own busy, well-mannered, happy and yet austere life. Her ‘greyness’ (her own description) did not diminish the intense admiration and affection with which she was regarded.

After Henry’s death in 1900, resigning as Principal some time later, she remained a lively member of the College Council until her own death. She had become a leading light in women’s education, a well-known speaker at academic gatherings and a formidable if quiet adversary of all misogynist attacks.

Helen Fowler, 2004

Further Reading

• Ethel Sidgwick, Mrs Henry Sidgwick ( London 1936)
• Helen Fowler, Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick 1845-1936 in Cambridge Women. Twelve Portraits ed. Edward Shils and Carmen Blacker (Cambridge 1996)
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)