[2] Her background, which was Quaker, was mentioned in her obituary in The Times, her 60 first cousins being a cross-section of those prominent in British intellectual life.
Fry had a governess, disliking the object lesson style of instruction, and attended Highfield, a boarding school at Liphook in Hampshire, for a year at age 16.
[5] In 1896 she was part of the British Astronomical Association expedition to Norway to observe the total solar eclipse of August 9.
In answer, there was "[...] she might then have the misfortune to marry one of Roger's friends, and, as it was, her father's dinner-time conversation supplied her with ample education [...]".
[13] She persuaded the Balkan Committee, formed as a result of the 1902–4 phase of the Macedonian Struggle, for whom her father was active, to fund in 1910 bursaries for education of Turkish girls.
[14][15] In 1909 Fry took Rectory Farm, a house in Great Hampden, Buckinghamshire, jointly with Constance who had married John Masefield in 1903.
[18] Ulick O'Connor, claiming that Isabel had demanded most of Constance's time after the marriage, called her a "sinister spinster".
She met leaders of the Young Turk movement: Talaat Pasha, and Midhat Shukri with whom she could not resolve her differences.
[22] Fry was engaged during World War I in Quaker relief work, as were her sisters Joan, Margery and Ruth.
[24][25] Mijin Cho, in British Quaker women and peace, 1880s to 1920s (Ph.D. dissertation, 2010) has investigated Fry's attitude to pacifism from her diary, finding the evidence inconclusive.
[26] She signed a letter appearing in the Positivist Review in 1915, advocating solution of disputes by arbitration, with a group including Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, William Archer and Gilbert Murray.
Mary Medd, a pupil there around 1920 for one year, described the library in the manor: "filled with books and periodicals of all sorts for everyone to read".
[35] Pupils gained the impression of "a formidable lady dressed in tweed drawers who painted, sang comic songs, and wrote the school plays.
[42] Fry had taken the outcome of the 1926 General Strike to heart,[33] and after leaving Mayortorne Manor had a number of difficult years.
She spent time in Wales, working in Quaker settlements of unemployed miners that had been set up by her sister Joan.
[48] The journals were left to Eugénie Dubois, who allowed Fry's biographer Beatrice Curtis Brown access.