If I gave an honest account of the editing of that volume people would laugh. Up to that time no careful register of “old girls” had been kept. These were the initial days of women learning to be business-like, I suppose, and if the girls’ names were known their addresses were not forthcoming, or else nobody had any idea whether or not the said “girls” were married.
Persistency and dogged determination is rewarded in most things, and in the end the first page of the little volume entitled:
“THE FIRST COLLEGE OPEN TO WOMEN,
QUEEN’S COLLEGE, LONDON,”
recorded the following contributions, among others (it appeared in 1898):
| Dorothea Beale, | “Recollections of the Early Days of Queen’s College.” |
| Sophia Jex Blake, | “The Medical Education of Women.” |
| Louisa Twining, | “Workhouses and Pauperism.” |
| Lady Beerbohm Tree, | “Quick, thy tablets, memory!” |
Dr. Jex Blake was too busy to write her own articles, so I jotted down the sort of thing I wanted and she filled in the facts and figures.
Another good lady’s I entirely re-wrote; it was so impossible in the form in which it was sent in.
Some of the other contributors accepted the task gleefully, wrote to the point, sent copy to date, returned their proofs the same day, and otherwise showed the difference between an amateur and the professional journalist.
Several of my contributors seemed unaccustomed to writing for the Press. One dear lady actually wrote to enquire how she would know when she had written fifteen hundred words. She explained that a friend had told her, that she had a friend, who had another friend, who thought that a column of a daily paper contained about three thousand words, etc. etc. I suggested her writing a page and counting it, and multiplying by the number of pages, but when the manuscript came back the first page had been counted, and at the top of the second page appeared, “Carried forward 162 words,” at the top of the third page, “Carried forward 314 words,” and so on, as if it were the butcher’s book. She had succeeded in life, but not as a scribe.
Another insisted on writing something quite different from the subject arranged and asked for.