She was the first child of Bertha Clara and Walter William Skeat.
She had five siblings including the anthropologist Walter William Skeat.
She was a student at Newnham College in Cambridge from 1882 to 1886 where she achieved a first-class examination result in medieval and modern languages.
[2] She then obtained a Cambridge teacher's certificate and a doctorate at the University of Zürich.
Her linguistic skills enabled her to create a list of modern English words that contained Anglo-French vowel sounds which was published by the English Dialect Society in 1884.