Elizabeth Dauncey (née More; 1506–1564), one of Thomas More's daughters, was part of a circle of exceptionally educated and accomplished women who exemplified "learned ladies" for the next two centuries.

Elizabeth and her siblings were educated in the humanist tradition by More, their tutor, William Gunnell, and a series of notable intellectuals within Thomas More's orbit such as Nicholas Kratzer (1487?

[4] He wrote that girls were "equally suited for those studies by which reason is cultivated and becomes fruitful like a ploughed land on which the seed of good lessons has been sown.

In 1543, her husband, brother, and their relative John Heywood (c. 1497 – c. 1580) were implicated in the Prebendaries' Plot, an attempt to oust Thomas Cranmer from the office of archbishop of Canterbury.

[10] Mary Scott, in her laudatory poem The Female Advocate (1775), collectively described the women of the More, Seymour, and Cooke families as "a bright assemblage.