Читать книгу A Short History of Newnham College, Cambridge - Alice Gardner - Страница 3

Table of Contents

This little book is primarily intended for present and past students of Newnham College and for the numerous friends who have been helpers or sympathetic spectators of its early progress. At the same time I venture to hope that it may prove interesting and suggestive to a wider circle of persons practically or theoretically concerned in movements for the higher education of women.

Of the deficiencies of this short history, no one could be more fully aware than the writer herself. But for the expressed wish of the Council of Newnham College, it would never have been attempted, nor could it have been written at all without the kind co-operation of friends, who, like myself, had known the College from the inside. I would especially thank the present Principal, Miss B. A. Clough, and the Registrar, Miss E. M. Sharpley, for supplying me with information and with kindly criticisms throughout my task. It has been gratifying to realize that the Publisher is son of an early friend of the College.

One of the chief difficulties in writing the history of a comparatively young institution, and one raised by the labours, forethought, and sacrifices of many "pious founders and benefactors" is that the range of view possible to any former student and teacher must necessarily be limited. I have felt deep regret in realizing how many honoured helpers have—for lack of space—not even been mentioned. Similarly, among the former students whose labours, scientific, literary, and practical, have brought credit to the College, I have necessarily shown most appreciation of those with whose work and influence I have been personally best acquainted. Every past student will have to supplement the story with recollections from her own experience.

I trust that, at least, I shall have brought home to many the conviction that Newnham College is unique, in the character and motives of its first founders, in the steady devotion to its best interests of successive governors, teachers and students, as also in its relations—complicated, but near, we may hope, to a solution—with the University under the protecting shadow of which it has grown to prosperity. My hope for this little work is that, besides helping to justify the existence of the College in the eyes of the world, it may in some measure preserve in its members the knowledge of our best traditions in the past and inspire a confident hope for the future.

ALICE GARDNER.

Bristol, April, 1921.