Frances Garnet Wolseley, 2nd Viscountess Wolseley

[1] In a letter sent from Crimea to his aunt, Garnet described his daughter as: neither exactly biped or quadruped, who cannot crawl or talk, who with large unmeaning eyes has no nose, but a weakly supported bald head , who bawls and screams by the hour and is only quiet when asleep, and who, pardon me, smells high.

I know of no more unpleasant insect, and would prefer fondling a young crocodile to taking into my arms a newly-born embryo of humanity.Garnet hoped for sons, but Frances remained the Wolseleys' only child.

Prince Albert Edward was also there and attempted to bond with them; Wolseley was charged by her mother to act as a chaperone because he was a notorious womanizer.

When they returned to London, Wolseley paid daily visits to her father's room at the War Office to follow the course of the campaign.

[4] Wolseley received a private education, which was erratic due to the itinerant lifestyle resulting from her father's career.

[2] Another motivation was to enable women to be useful in parts of the British Empire that needed skilled professionals, such as Australia and South Africa.

Her mother expected her to move too to take care of them and was enraged when Wolseley raised enough funds to rent the greenhouse from the new tenants.

The two-year course exacted high standards and attracted the patronage of famed gardeners such as Gertrude Jekyll, Ellen Willmott, and William Robinson.

[2] Inspired by her father, she ran a military discipline at the college, tolerating no mistakes and punishing all students if a plant died.

Wolseley's harsh evaluations of students reveal that she found unrefined, poorly behaved, and slack women unsuitable to become professional gardeners.

[5] Wolseley eventually left the day-to-day work in running the college to a couple of graduates in order to pursue a wider campaign.

Lord Wolseley placed a memorandum with his solicitors, asserting that she had made a "self-elected desertion of her natural home" and that the rift was not "forced upon her by our conduct towards her".

[2][8] Wolseley's father died on 31 March that year; she learned about it when she saw "a sandwich man carrying a large announcement, and to my horror saw my own surname".

In the same year she inherited the viscountcy from her father (remainder by special arrangement) and then moved to Massetts Place near Lindfield, West Sussex with her mother.