ABSTRACT
Born on 8 June 1888 in Putney where her father was a Presbyterian minister, as a teenager she became fluent in French, German, and Italian when her father’s breakdown in health necessitated living abroad. In 1908, with his health restored and living in Oxford, his daughter enrolled in the Society of Oxford Home-Students (now known as St Anne’s College), where she studied history. Writing about her time at the college, Matheson recalled that ‘we [felt] in the very van of progress. I suspect that each generation of women students has felt very much the same’.2 Even so, to those HomeStudents in the first decade of this century, many of whom, like Matheson, lived at home, ‘the University, on the side of its undergraduate activities, seemed to us marvellous and remote [but] one had little dealings with them, whatever one might do unofficially’.3
