Ellen Wordsworth Darwin

Ellen Wordsworth Darwin

Ellen Wordsworth Darwin (13 January 1856 – 28 August 1903) was an academic. a Fellow and lecturer in English Literature at Newnham College in Cambridge (1879-1883), a member of the private and scholarly Ladies Dining Society at Cambridge and the second wife of the botanist Sir Francis Darwin, son of Charles Darwin. Their daughter was the poet Frances Cornford.

Born Ellen Wordsworth Crofts in Leeds, the daughter of Ellen née Wordsworth, the daughter of a Leeds industrialist, and John Crofts, a magistrate and worsted and woollen manufacturer, she was a cousin of Henry Sidgwick. Her older brother was Ernest Crofts RA, a painter of historical and military scenes. She was a student at Newnham College in Cambridge from 1874 to 1847 and returned there to teach English literature from 1878 until 1883, but had to give it up after her marriage to the botanist Francis Darwin at Oxford that year. A close friend from her Newnham days was the British classical scholar and linguist Jane Ellen Harrison.

Bernard Darwin, Francis Darwin's son with his late first wife, had been brought up by his grandparents Emma and Charles Darwin (and by Emma alone after the death of Charles Darwin in 1882) after the death of his mother days after his birth. On his father's marriage to Ellen Wordsworth Crofts Bernard went to live with the newly-married couple. He wrote in his autobiography of his step-mother: "Ellen was always kind as could be in reading with me and playing with me, but there was always some feeling of reserve: perhaps she tried too hard to be a good stepmother and never to outstep those limits." She suffered a miscarriage in 1884 but gave birth to her daughter Frances in 1886.

In the summer of 1888 Ellen Darwin wrote to her sister-in-law Ida Darwin to say that her friend Amy Levy was going to pay a visit and confiding: "She has written a novel, in which the heroine is partly me. I have not read it yet, but I don’t expect much: her stories and novels are rather saddening." Levy's second novel Reuben Sachs: A Sketch was published shortly after and caused some controversy with its satirical description of a well-off Anglo-Jewish community and its depiction of the Victorian marriage market.

Darwin was a member of the Ladies Dining Society - a private women's dining and discussion club, based at Cambridge University founded in 1890 by the author Louise Creighton and the women's activist Kathleen Lyttelton. Its members, most of whom were married to Cambridge academics, were believers in women’s education and were active in the campaign to grant women Cambridge degrees. Most were strong supporters of female suffrage. Darwin was strongly agnostic and took her discussions seriously, a friend observing "It was at once distracting and delightfully amusing to hear her say, as she not infrequently did, 'I know I’m right'".

She died in 1903 aged 47 and is buried in the churchyard of St Andrew's church in Girton, Cambridgeshire.