The course will consider literature, education, charity work and women's suffrage through the lives of the 12 women who formed the Ladies' Dining Society 1890-1914, including Lady Caroline Jebb, Lady Ida Darwin, Eleanor Sidgwick, Charlotte Linda Morgan, Maud Darwin and Adela Adam. The course will include a session looking at the masters' wives signature quilt in the collection of the Museum of Cambridge, a rare chance to see this historically significant and beautiful work.
Course programme
Friday 19 February 2016
Please plan to arrive between 16:30 and 18:30. You can meet other course members in the bar which opens at 18:15. Tea and coffee making facilities are available in the study bedrooms.
19:00 Dinner
20:30 The married generation
22:00 Terrace bar open for informal discussion
Saturday 20 February 2016
07:30 Breakfast
09:00 Intellectual partnerships?
10:30 Coffee
11:00 The rise of the new woman
12:30 Free
13:00 Lunch
14:00 Free
16:00 Tea
16:30 Becoming a Darwin
18:30 Dinner
20:00 Broadening the mind
21:30 Terrace bar open for informal discussion
Sunday 21 February 2016
07:30 Breakfast
09:00 Finding their voice (Tamsin Wimhurst, Guest lecturer)
10:30 Coffee
11:00 The women's legacy
12:30 Free
12:45 Lunch
The course will disperse after lunch.
About the tutors
Dr Ann Kennedy Smith has taught courses on nineteenth century literature and art at the Institute since 2006. She is currently researching the lives of Cambridge’s pioneering wives and women students, and is contributing articles on Caroline Jebb and her circle to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (forthcoming). Her proposal for a biography of the group was shortlisted for the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Prize 2015. Her book Painted Poetry: The Language of Colour in Baudelaire’s Art Criticism was published by Peter Lang in 2011, and her chapter ‘Tennyson’s French reception’ will appear in The Reception of Alfred Lord Tennyson in Europe (Bloomsbury, 2016).
Carolyn Ferguson’s first career was in scientific research and she has worked for various research organisations and published papers in leading journals. In recent years she has developed an interest in antique textiles and their relationship to the social history of the 19th centuries; two interests which have been brought together in papers published in Quilt Studies. As a result of research on the Masters’ Wives coverlet, owned by the Museum of Cambridge, Carolyn has examined at the lives of Cambridge women in the 1890s. She recently collaborated with Ann Kennedy Smith on a paper entitled ‘The Cambridge wives Lives: Rewriting the Victorian Marriage’ for the Writing Lives Together conference held at the University of Leicester.
