Margaret Alford

Margaret Alford was a pioneering woman classicist who achieved a First at Cambridge University in 1887, a time when women were not formally awarded degrees. She spent more than two decades teaching at schools and universities, while publishing and editing many books. She specialised in Latin prose, particularly the works of Livy, Tacitus and Cicero, an area almost entirely dominated by male scholars.^[1]

Education

Margaret Alford was taught ancient Greek from an early age by her father, Bradley Hurt Alford, a Church of England clergyman.^[1] She attended Maida Vale High School, a girls' day school in London. She spent two terms at Bedford College, London as a Trustees Scholar, before transferring to Girton College, Cambridge, where she graduated with a First in 1887 (although women were not awarded degrees from Cambridge at that time). Here JP Postgate, the well-known supporter of women in higher education, supervised her Latin prose composition. Her older sister, Dorothy (later Banks) studied Natural Sciences at the same college.^[2] Punch magazine noted, and satirised, the success of women in Classics at Cambridge at the time, and of the two women's colleges Girton and Newnham;^[3] Alford was mentioned as 'a Classical First' in a verse called The Ladies' Year ^[4]

Main posts and achievements

• 1891-1917 - Visiting Lecturer at Girton College
• 1894-1919 - Visiting Lecturer at Westfield College, London
• 1904-1909 - Head of Department of Latin at Bedford College, London
• 1918-1943 - Managed the periodicals for the joint Societies (Hellenic and Roman), and served on the council for the Hellenic Society
• 1942-1945 - served as the only woman on the editorial staff of the Oxford Latin Dictionary
• Worked on other books including Lidell-Scott-Jones's Greek-English Lexicon,^[5] Lampe's Patristic Greek Lexicon, and index to Allen's edition of the Letters of Erasmus
• 1943 - elected to Honorary Fellowship of Girton
• 1943 - awarded with an honorary MA from the University of Oxford ^[6][1]

Published works

Throughout her career as a university lecturer, Alford published a number of books, mostly commentaries on Latin texts:

• Livy Book V (Macmillan Elementary Classics 1892)
• Latin prose for translation: for the use of higher forms in school and of students working for pass degrees (London: Macmillan & Co. 1902)
• Versions of Latin Passages for Translation (London: Macmillan 1910)
• Tacitus, Histories Book I (University of London Press 1912)
• Cicero, Letters to Atticus Book II (London: Macmillan Red 1929)
• Livy Book II (London: Macmillan Elementary Classics 1933)

Further reading

• Rosie Wyles and Edith Hall (eds), 2014, Unsealing the Fountain: Pioneering Female Philologists from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press
• Stray, C. (ed.), 1999. Classics in 19th and 20th century Cambridge, Cambridge University Press

References