ABSTRACT
In 1871 when their joint work began to take shape Henrietta Stanley, at sixty-four, had long since grown stout and matronly but her face had not lost all signs of her early beauty. Maria Grey was fifty-five and the only existing portait shows her strong-featured face hardened into severity by ugly, steel-rimmed spectacles. The writer Augustus Hare, meeting her a few years later, described her as ‘a little lady . . . with glistening silver hair . . . very pleasant – a bright, active, simple mind, which finds its vent in excitement for the superior education of women’. 42 Emily Shirreff, two years older than her sister, wore the same ugly spectacles: even so her face had a gentle, serene expression, with a glimmer of humour which Maria’s lacked. Mary Gurney, the baby of the quartette, was only thirty-five, making up in intelligence what she lacked in beauty. ‘Miss Mary Gurney, of few words, but these straight to the point’, 43 was an apt description of her.
