[4] She attended various private schools in southern England, and in 1858, enrolled at Queen's College, London, despite her parents' objections.

In 1859, while still a student, she was offered a post as mathematics tutor at the college where she stayed until 1861, living for some of that time with Octavia Hill's family.

She worked without pay; her family did not expect their daughter to earn a living, and her father refused her permission to accept a salary.

At the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston, she met one of the country's pioneer female physicians, Dr Lucy Ellen Sewall, who became an important and lifelong friend, and she worked there for a time as an assistant.

The following year, she hoped to attend a new medical college being established by Elizabeth Blackwell in New York, but her father died, so she returned to England to be with her mother.

With education of girls being restricted to domestic crafts, though, women generally could not qualify to compete with men as medical practitioners.

She said that the matter could easily be tested by granting women "a fair field and no favour" - teaching them as men were taught and subjecting them to the same examinations.

Sophia Jex-Blake was determined to seek medical training in the UK, and due to Scotland's more enlightened attitudes towards education, felt that if any university would allow women to study, it would be a Scottish one.

Sophia Jex-Blake wrote in one of her letters to her great friend Lucy Sewall: "It is a grand thing to enter the very first British University ever opened to women, isn't it?"

It is one of the lessons of the history of progress that when the time for reform has come you cannot resist it, though if you make the attempt, what you may do is to widen its character or precipitate its advent.

Three months later, she opened an outpatient clinic at 73 Grove Street, Fountainbridge, where poor women could receive medical attention for a few pence.

The first students included Elsie Inglis, Grace Ross Cadell, and her sister Georgina, but Jex-Blake's skill as a teacher did not match her role as a doctor.

An acrimonious split emerged, with her students culminating in an infamous court case in 1889, where Jex-Blake was successfully sued for damages.

Thereafter, the Cadell sisters pursued their studies with the more genial, though far younger, Elsie Inglis, who had set up a rival school, the Edinburgh College of Medicine for Women.

On Jex-Blake's retirement in 1899, they moved to Windydene, Mark Cross, Rotherfield, where Dr Todd wrote The Way of Escape in 1902 and Growth in 1906.

[17] In 2021, a production of a dramatic piece about the experiences of Jex-Blake and the Edinburgh Seven, Sophia, by Scottish playwright Frances Poet, was announced.