Elizabeth Wordsworth

Dame Elizabeth Wordsworth (1840–1932) was founding Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford and she funded and founded St Hugh's College. She was also an author, sometimes writing under the name Grant Lloyd. Life Wordsworth was born in 1840 at Harrow on the Hill and she was educated at home, she learned several modern languages as well as (self taught) Latin and Greek though her knowledge of science and mathematics was meagre. She had a "persevering familiarity" with the Greek testament, as well as the Iliad, which she read at the rate of fifty lines a day with the help of a Latin translation. Her mother was Susanna Hatley Frere and her father Christopher Wordsworth was a headmaster and later the Bishop of Lincoln. Her brothers were John Wordsworth, Bishop of Salisbury, and Christopher Wordsworth, a liturgical scholar. She travelled on European family trips and she was brought up in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey and in Stanford in the Vale in Berkshire. She was the great-niece of the poet William Wordsworth. She was the founding Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford in 1879 as a college for female undergraduates, on Norham Gardens in North Oxford. She continued in this role until her retirement in 1909, when she was succeeded by Henrietta Jex-Blake.