Citizenship United Kingdom Education University of Oxford Nationality British Fields Literature | Name Edith Morley Died 1964 | |
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Books The Life and Times of Henry Crabb Robinson | ||
Edith Morley (1875–1964) was a British literary scholar who was the main 20th century editor of the works of Henry Crabb Robinson. She was the first woman appointed to a chair at a British university-level institution.
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Career
Edith Julia Morley was born in 1875 and later recalled that she had not liked being a girl, being impatient of the restrictions placed on her activities by Victorian notions of decorum. Morley received a good education, starting at a private boarding school for girls. In 1892, she took a course at King's College Ladies Department, where her abilities were noticed and it was suggested that she transfer to the Oxford Honour School of English and English Literature. Along with the few other women at Oxford University in that period, she was kept rather isolated, with limited access to the university's resources, and was awarded an "equivalent" degree rather than a standard Oxford degree.
The difficulties Morley experienced getting an education helped to shape her political views towards Fabianism and she joined the Fabian Society around 1908 and became a member of the Fabian Executive Committee in 1914. She was also a champion of women's rights, arguing that marriage and motherhood were used to hold women back from professional careers. In her 1914 book Women Workers in Seven Professions, she describes how women academics tend to be found in restricted markets like women's colleges, creating a situation of artificial scarcity under which women are forced to compete against each other (rather than against both men and women) for the few available resources.
In 1908, Morley was appointed Professor of English Language at University College in Reading, thereby becoming the first woman appointed to a chair at an English university-level institution. She held this post until 1940, by which time the erstwhile University College had become the University of Reading. Her speciality was English literature, and for many years she regularly published a lengthy roundup of recent scholarship in her field under the heading "The Eighteenth Century" in the bibliographical review entitled The Year's Work in English Studies. She is known for her comprehensive 1935 biography of the writer and traveller Henry Crabb Robinson and as the primary 20th century editor of Robinson's writings.
In 1950, she was made a member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), an honour awarded for her work setting up the Reading Refugee Committee and assisting Belgian Jewish refugees in World War II. For this work, she was included among the hundred or so women in Sybil Oldfield's book Doers of the Word: A Biographical Dictionary of British Women Humanitarians Active Between 1900–1950.
The University of Reading holds a collection of her papers, including correspondence (1914–1939), lecture notebooks (1893–1914), photographs, and an unpublished memoir entitled Looking Before and After. In 2014, the university held her up as a role model during its celebration of International Women's Day. The university's Humanities and Social Sciences Building was renamed the Edith Morley Building in 2017.