Ladies Dining Society

It has been stated that the Society stands "as a testament to friendship and intellectual debate at a time when women’s voices went largely unheard.

[3] It was against this background that Kathleen Lyttelton suggested to her friend Louise Creighton that they should start a ladies dining club.

[4] In 1890,[3] the pair invited a select group of nine (later ten) of their married friends to join their society,[1] "not without an idea of retaliating on the husbands who dined in College.

[3] The members took it in turn to host once or twice a term, leaving their husbands either to dine at their colleges or to eat a solitary meal in their studies.

Margaret Verrall was a classicist and lecturer at the college who, according to a friend "was very easily bored and disliked stale or fruitless controversy".

Writing to Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College, Oxford she reported "The 'Eleven' dined on Tuesday at Mrs George Darwin's.

According to her eldest daughter, the engraver Gwen Raverat, Maud had arrived in England with a great respect for culture, and eager to learn all she could.

[12] She campaigned for the introduction of women police officers in Britain, publishing an article in The Nineteenth Century and After in 1914.

Gwen Raverat later recalled her "amusing American turn of conversation, complete lack of inhibitions, and great personality".

[4] Henry James, who later became a close friend and whom she nursed during his final illness, described her as "a little Irish lady … full of humour and humanity and curiosity and interrogation—too much interrogation".

[15] With Kathleen Lyttelton having died in 1907,[16] and several members having moved away from Cambridge, the society finally broke up with the coming of war in 1914.

[15] The ODNB states that The Ladies Dining Society stands "as a testament to friendship and intellectual debate at a time when women’s voices went largely unheard".