On her mother’s side her grandfather was the prominent British lawyer William Henry Ashurst, influential in radical causes from abolishing the church rate taxes to Italian unification.

Her other aunt Emilie Ashurst Venturi was the main translator and propagandist for the Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, the editor of The Shield (the magazine for repealing the Contagious Diseases Acts), and the author of numerous essays.

This splinter group included her sisters Caroline Stansfeld and Emilie Venturi, and important activists of the era such as Ursula Bright, Lydia Becker, Frances Power Cobbe, and Helen Blackburn.

[1] Biggs was a member of Clementia Taylor’s group calling for the end of slavery: London’s Ladies Emancipation Society.

In an obituary, “A friend” wrote of her many accomplishments, all made with her “facile pen and fertile brain.”[12] During her free time as a school girl, Biggs busied herself “collating and copying out the speeches of the Italian patriot and close family friend Giuseppe Mazzini for reproduction in a provincial newspaper.”[1] He also wrote directly to her.

[1] The book was widely reviewed as “well told” and “deeply interesting.” It opens in 1830 and tells the story of the estate of Wingbourne through the eyes of a visitor.

The owner and his nephew are drunkards; his daughter Florence is a victim of overindulgence and under-education, but the object of the narrator’s affections nonetheless.

[1] Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage commissioned Biggs to write the chapter on Great Britain for volume III of their groundbreaking survey of early feminism: The History of Woman Suffrage.

After her death her colleagues set up a loan fund to assist women students of Cambridge attending Girton College.

[16] In fact her youngest sister Kate Ada Ashurst Biggs attended Girton from 1877 to 1879 before withdrawing from ill health.