Last Words to Girls: On Life in School and after School

The Shirreff sisters, Emily (1814-97) and Maria Georgina (later Grey; 1816-1906) were pioneers in the field of education for girls in the wider context of women’s rights. They jointly wrote the influential two-volume Thoughts on Self-Culture, Addressed to Women (1850), and Emily (whose books are also reissued in this series) was briefly the principal of the college at Hitchin which became Girton College, Cambridge. The sisters founded the Girls’ Public Day School Company in 1872; by 1905 it had opened 37 girls’ schools across Britain. Grey also set up the first training college for women in London in 1878: it was renamed in her honour in 1892. In this 1889 work, she looks back, offering to the young ‘the results of her life’s thought and experience’, and endeavouring to help late-Victorian school-leavers answer the questions ‘Where are we going? What is the use and object of all this school work?