ABSTRACT
As the previous chapter has indicated, a transnational network of women’s sporting interest expanded in the second half of the nineteenth century. New kinds of education and social health provision were often the result of selfconscious innovation but could have unintended consequences on leisure and sporting competition. By 1900, ‘Women were emerging as a political and social force-they were getting jobs, travelling, motoring, cycling, joining clubs for their hobbies and becoming avid readers of magazines.’2 Popular entertainment, voluntarism, and the amateur ethos behind many codifi ed sports shaped activities in uneven ways. Victorian booms in croquet, cycling, golf, mountaineering, skating, tennis and fi eld sports had involved a range of female consumers from the expanding middle and upper classes. Swimming involved the lower orders too.3 Much biographical and life-writing material remains to be developed for female athletes during this period more generally. For instance, Mark Ryan’s biography of the 1902 Wimbledon women’s singles winner Muriel Robb (1878-1907), who came from Jesmond, Newcastle Upon Tyne reminds us that elite Edwardian women’s tennis was by no means just a London-based or Southern phenomenon.4
