Ann Kennedy Smith on two Cambridge libraries
‘Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.’
Virginia Woolf’s glorious declaration of intellectual freedom in A Room of One’s Own (1929) was the result of her female protagonist being prevented from entering Cambridge’s most prestigious library, the Wren Library at Trinity College (she calls it ‘an Oxbridge college’ in her book, but it’s easily identifiable). This post is about two of the college libraries that were open to women students from the beginning, and are now among Cambridge’s best-stocked and most beautiful reading spaces, accessible to anyone with a reader’s ticket.
The right to read
When Cambridge University’s first two colleges for women, Girton and Newnham, opened their doors (in 1869 and 1871 respectively), they offered their students a room of their own in which to live and study away from their families. ‘How much more effectually, & with how much less mental strain, a woman can study,’ Anne Jemima Clough, the first principal of Newnham College, wrote, ‘where all the arrangements of the house are made to suit the hours of study, — where she can have undisturbed possession of one room, — and where she can have access to any books that she may need.’¹
Having the right to read books in a library, even in a place like Cambridge, was not something that could be taken for granted in Victorian times. From the beginning, female students, lecturers, scholars and scientists at Cambridge had only limited access to the university’s libraries, lecture halls and laboratories because as women, they were not members of the university. By the 1890s, as male undergraduate numbers grew, there was increasing demand on these privileged spaces and the women were edged out further. Female scholars had no automatic right to enter the University Library (even though the books they had written and co-authored with male colleagues were stocked there) - by 1897, the same year as the protest against women’s degrees, access to the library by ‘non-members’ was reduced to a meagre two hours a day.²
A reading room of their own
Girton College Stanley Library
The answer for Girton and Newnham was to build, not just study-bedrooms and dining halls for their students, but well-stocked libraries of their own. To do this, they needed donations from members of the public. Tennyson, Ruskin and George Eliot were early supporters of Girton, and gave valuable gifts of books as well as money. Henrietta, Lady Stanley of Alderley (1807–1895) gave £1,000 towards the first Library, which was named after her in 1895. E. E. Constance Jones, Girton librarian from 1890 to 1893, recollected that ‘The library was to a great extent a lending library for the students, and the fine room which contained the bulk of our books at that time - the Stanley Library - was much frequented as a reading-room.’³ (Above is a painting of students at work there. Note the large shared table in the middle.)
That room, with its beautiful stained-glass windows, is still there today, but in the 1930s, a bigger library was required to cope with Girton College’s increasing numbers of students and book collections, and the beautiful McMorran Library, with its awe-inspiring vaulted timber ceiling (see the photo I took below) was built. It has been expanded with a multi-award winning extension, and with over 95,000 books it’s still one of the largest, and arguably most-loved, libraries in the university.
Girton College, Upper Reading Room
Notes
1. A talk given in 1874, quoted in Gillian Sutherland, Faith, Duty and the Power of Mind: The Cloughs and their Circle 1820–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 99.
2. ‘In this paper, I explore the admission of women readers in greater detail and examine how the control of access to (male) privileged spaces such as the University Library (alongside lecture halls and laboratories) was bound up with and symbolic of the status of women in the university.’ Jill Whitelock, ‘"Lock up your libraries"? Women readers at Cambridge University Library, 1855–1923’ in Library & Information History, Volume 38 Issue 1, Page 1-22, ISSN 1758-3489 (free to read online).
3. E. E. Constance Jones, As I Remember: An Autobiographical Ramble (London: A. & C. Black, 1922), p. 76.
This post is republished with permission from Ann Kennedy Smith’s wonderful Substack, A Cambridge Notebook, which has many excellent essays on women in Cambridge and other historical and literary topics.
