Grace Eleanor Hadow

Grace Eleanor Hadow OBE (9 December 1875 in Cirencester, England – 19 January 1940, Marylebone, London) was an author, principal of what would become St Anne's College, Oxford and vice-chairman of the National Federation of Women's Institutes (NFWI).

She was the youngest child and fourth daughter of the Reverend William Elliott Hadow and Mary Lang née Cornish.

In 1900, she began to study English at Somerville College, Oxford,[3] but as a woman she was not allowed to receive a degree, although she could sit exams and took first-class honours in 1903.

Her other publications included a selection of the works of John Dryden (1908) and editions of Robert Browning's Men and Women (1911) and Walter Raleigh's The Historie of the World (1917).

[10] There her work and ideas impressed Professor W. G. S. Adams and, late in 1918, he persuaded her to become Secretary of the recently founded Barnett House at Oxford.

[13] In 1921 she declined the position of Principal of Lady Margaret Hall in order to remain at Barnett House and work with Adams in implementing a Plunkett Foundation programme for the relief of rural disadvantage,[14] and in the same year she wrote the first edition of the National Federation of Women's Institutes (NFWI) handbook.