Emily Langton Massingberd

[9][10][11] Her husband Edmund died, aged 34, in November 1875, at Eastwood, East Cliffe Road, Bournemouth, the home of his father Rev.

In 1944 her daughter Diana and husband Field Marshal Archibald Montgomery-Massingberd gave the Gunby Hall estate to the National Trust during World War II, when it was threatened with demolition to make way for an airfield.

[22] In January 1881 she held a notable fancy dress dance "at the Assembly Room of the Red House, Bournemouth".

[23] In September 1882 she held a "fashionable concert" at the Red House in aid of funds for the Bournemouth Dispensary.

[3] In Bournemouth, on 15 December 1883, suffragettes Laura Ormiston Chant and Caroline Biggs "held a drawing-room meeting at the home of Mrs Langton (The Red House, Derby Road)".

[3] When her father died in 1887, she succeeded to Gunby Hall and resumed her maiden name by royal licence, and thenceforth went by "Mrs. Massingberd" rather than "Mrs. Langton".

Becoming a vice-president of the United Kingdom Alliance, a Manchester-based temperance movement, she was also honorary treasurer to Lady Henry Somerset's Cottage Homes for Inebriates, a farm colony for women at Duxhurst, just south of Reigate.

Speakers included Bernard Shaw, Millicent Fawcett, Mrs Pearsall Smith, Lady Henry Somerset and Frances Willard.

[1][26] Following a long illness, Emily Langton Massingberd underwent a serious operation at Llandudno in Wales, but a few weeks later died on 28 January 1897.

[1] Following Massingberd's untimely death, L. T. Meade wrote a novel in 1898 based on her life titled The Cleverest Woman in England.

[27][28][29] In it she writes of the protagonist: She was one of the pioneers in a great movement; and although her life ceased when her work was hardly begun, there are still some women in London who remember her, and can never forget her ... who but for her would not have dared to break through the thraldom of the narrow walls of old prejudice, and those women still in memory hear her voice, and touch her hand.