The House at the End of Hope Street - By Menna van Praag Page 0,107

1871 cofounded Newnham College, the second Cambridge college for women, after Girton College in 1869. However, while female students at Cambridge studied to degree level and took the exams (Millicent’s daughter Philippa ranking highest in the Mathematical Tripos in 1890), they weren’t awarded full degrees until 1947.

Daphne du Maurier (1907–1989)

A British author and playwright,* du Maurier’s most famous novel is Rebecca (1938), which opens with the line “Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again.” This book, along with her short stories The Birds and Don’t Look Now, were made into major films. The film version of Rebecca, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, won the Oscar for best film in 1940.

Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928)

Emmeline Pankhurst was a suffragette, a radical campaigner for the rights of women. Widely criticized for her militant tactics,* she still, like the less militant Fawcetts, played a pivotal role in finally achieving the vote for women. In 1999, Time named her one of the 100 Most Important People of the Twentieth Century.

Elizabeth Taylor (1932–2011)

Taylor was born in London to American parents. Winner of two Academy Awards for her roles in BUtterfield 8 (1960) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). She also received the Presidential Citizens Medal, the Medal of the Legion of Honor, and a Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute, which named her seventh in their list of the “Greatest American Screen Legends.” In 2000 she was made a Dame of the British Empire. She married eight times, twice to actor Richard Burton.

Bathroom

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)

Born in Boston, Plath studied at two all-female colleges: Smith College, Massachusetts, and Newnham College, Cambridge. There she met the poet Ted Hughes. They courted with poems, married in 1956, and had two children before he left her for another woman. In 1963 she committed suicide. In 1982 she became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously, for The Collected Poems. Plath’s most famous work is The Bell Jar (1963), an autobiographical novel about depression.

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967)

Dorothy was a poet famous for her great wit. She sold her first poem to Vanity Fair in 1914 and worked there and at Vogue for several years. At Vanity Fair she met Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood and together they informally founded the Algonquin Round Table.* In 1925 Harold Ross founded The New Yorker and Parker’s first piece appeared in its second issue. Her first collection of poetry, Enough Rope (1926), contained the famous poem “Résumé,” about suicide. She received two Academy Award nominations for screenplays and worked very successfully until she was placed on the Hollywood blacklist for her liberal politics. She married three times, twice (like Elizabeth Taylor) to the same man. Despite attempting suicide several times she ultimately died of a heart attack.

Living Room

Doris Lessing (b. 1919)

Lessing left school at fourteen and thereafter educated herself. Doris Lessing’s most famous novels include The Golden Notebook (1962), a significant feminist text influential in the women’s liberation movements of the 1960s, and The Grass Is Singing (1950). In 2007 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the eleventh woman in 106 years. In 2008 the Times ranked her fifth on its list of the 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945.

Vivien Leigh (1913–1967)

Also known as Lady Olivier, from her marriage to Sir Laurence Olivier, the British actress won two Academy Awards for her roles in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Gone With the Wind (1939). Leigh pursued the lead role in Gone With the Wind with great determination, despite being relatively unknown and British, telling a journalist long before the film was cast that she would play Scarlett O’Hara. Leigh suffered from bipolar disorder, which gave her a reputation for being difficult to work with. She divorced from Olivier in 1960.

Vanessa Bell (1879–1961)

Born Vanessa Stephen, sister of Virginia Woolf. Bell was a painter and member of the Bloomsbury Group, an influential circle of English writers and intellectuals including Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey. Her significant paintings include portraits of her sister and of Aldous Huxley. Bell is considered one of the major contributors to British portrait drawing and landscape art in the twentieth century.

Agatha Christie (1890–1976)

Born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller, Christie, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, is the best-selling novelist of all time.* Her novels have sold approximately four billion copies and have been translated into more than 100 languages. Her best-loved books are the Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot mysteries, though she also wrote short stories, and romances under a pseudonym. Her