Marion Kennedy moved to Cambridge with her family in 1867 when her father Benjamin Kennedy became Regius Professor of Greek. Kennedy and his three daughters were staunch supporters of women’s right to higher education, and it was in their drawing room in Bateman Street that Mary Paley and other early students informally sat tripos examinations in the 1870s. In 1877 Marion became secretary of the Association for Promoting the Higher Education of Women in Cambridge; when the association was amalgamated with Newnham Hall in 1880, she became honorary secretary to what was henceforth Newnham College, a post she retained until 1904. Her untiring work for Newnham was recognised in 1888 by the foundation of a postgraduate studentship, first held by Philippa Fawcett. Her family’s support for Newnham was acknowledged in the naming of Kennedy Hall, opened in 1905, and their coat of arms was one of the four combined in the Newnham College arms granted in 1923.
Marion Kennedy was born just too early to take advantage of the women’s educational institutions she supported. She did, however, attend the early ‘lectures for ladies’ given by sympathetic (male) dons in the early 1870s; and in the following decade, she and her younger sister Julia wrote most of the Revised Latin Primer which was published under their father’s name in 1888. In 1913, aged seventy-seven, she marched in the suffrage procession in London. Her portrait, painted in his typical Sargent style by Sir James Shannon in 1892, when she was 56, shows a Victorian lady, at once benign and formidable. Compare and contrast Augustus John’s unconventional 1909 portrait of Jane Harrison (then 59).
Christopher Stray, 2004
To read further
Marion and Julia Kennedy, Christopher Stray, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, OUP 2004
