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where no one of the three can be exercised?’ Why are they denied the ‘brilliant, sharp radiance of intellect’, suppressed in darkness? 5 She knew how desperate a life lived in the shallows could be, and how soul-destroying it was to be condemned to triviality.
    Florence Nightingale found a different way to fulfil her potential, but had a university education been available, she would have been the perfect candidate. She became one of the first reputable Englishwomen to enjoy a career. She was a formidable statistician, a quick and sinewy thinker who deftly exposed the sclerotic blunderings of the British military machine. She was a philosopher, too, of startling insight. A woman’s life is sketchy, she maintained. Someone needs to colour in the picture, give it depth. She had the bravery to do that herself; others, like Constance Maynard, needed help.
    In fact, help was on its way. It dragged its feet, it’s true, for the first half of the nineteenth century, but by the time Nightingale discovered her own vocation in the early 1850s, the political and cultural movement that was to result in university places for women was beginning to gather pace and a sense of purpose. Her argument was just one of many urging on the juggernaut.
    The reason for the initial lack of progress is obvious. For all the practical efforts of reformers like Bathsua Makin andCatherine Macaulay, and the theoretical proposals of Wollstonecraft and Defoe, a vicious circle still swirled round the subject of educating girls. Until there were good schools in place to teach them the basics, there was no hope of girls’ academic development. That called for good teachers, but without good schools in the first place, where were they to come from?
    Home tutoring was available, of course, to those whose fathers could afford it, and happened to approve of spending money informing the mind of a mere wife-to-be. Childhood was a middle-class invention of the Victorian era; before that infant girls were dressed as miniature women, and expected to behave as such – with some allowances – until they could earn money either by manual work or marrying well. It must have seemed to traditionalists an extravagant caprice to consider investing in female intellect. But some middle-class sisters did share their brothers’ tutors, and daughters could learn fast and well from amiable parents.
    Constance Maynard, born in 1849, was one of them. Her early education, like that of so many of the other pioneers, was largely a matter of scavenging. Every Thursday afternoon, her mother would teach the four youngest Maynards an unconventional curriculum of ‘exactly what we liked’, which included printing, willow-plaiting, heraldry, drawing in perspective, and memorizing the Greek alphabet. Constance soon tired of this, and longed for her brother George to come home from boarding school and feed her real (if regurgitated) knowledge. One holiday, he brought her a map of the stars, and every clear night the two of them would steal outside and learn the constellations. ‘Here was a sort of outlet into Eternity… George and I were left to ourselves, and we laboured away at the starry sky till we “got it right”.’ 6
    Constance’s elder sisters had also been sent to school, andConstance joined them for a couple of years, but it was her parents’ whim that in her case this was a waste of time and money. Father failed to see why he should go on paying for an expensive school, when Constance could quite easily pick up her education at second hand from the older girls. The implication that she was not worth the investment hurt Constance deeply, but she never complained. She had been too well brought up.
    A hand-me-down education might have had its attractions for Mr Maynard, but to Constance it was useless. The Maynards’ money bought their daughters gentility, but very little learning. All those unimpeachable maiden ladies (often clusters of sisters) who ran nice, private