The Life of Sophia Jex-Blake

Abstract

SOPHIA JEX-BLAKE was born in 1840 and died in 1912. The world, when she entered it, offered to an intellectual woman neither the education nor the openings which her more fortunate brothers enjoyed as a right and sought to preserve as a monopoly. It is to her, probably more than to any other individual, and to her long and often bitter fight in the women's cause, that their right to a liberal education has been conceded and the gates of the ineclical profession opened to them. She was a born chronicler and recorder, as well as a downright and formidable antagonist, and this, which has enabled her biographer to write a full and accurate account of her career, often stood her in good stead against her opponents. Reproduced as an appendix is the correspondence in the Times in which she replied to the representations of the Principal of Edinburgh University—a masterly instance of the power of facts over the most skilful advocacy and embroidery. As her biographer remarks: “The two letters represent two conflicting schools of historians, the one sweeping, picturesque, probable; the other definite, statistical, true.”

The Life of Sophia Jex-Blake.

By Dr. Margaret Todd (“Graham Travers”). Pp. xviii + 574, (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1918.) Price 18s. net.