My mother, Agnes Catherine Plumbe (1876 - 1954), was the eldest of ten children. She was named Agnes after Dickens' heroine because her father used to read David Copperfield aloud to her mother while they waited for her to be born.
When she was a child she was a mix of smart bookworm and tomboy. She liked to read above all things. Once, when she was very little, she was scolded because she entertained a little guest by giving her a book to read and then she retreated to a corner with one. As she grew up and proved to be "good with babies," she was asked (too much, perhaps) to help with the sisters and brothers who kept arriving. Later in life she expressed some resentment that the younger members of the family, especially Gwyneth, had much less responsibility and much more fun. However, in that big house there was enough domestic help, and sometimes I think that the mother took care of the children simply because she was so fond of them.
When she reached adolescence, she realized that she was academically inclined and her parents sympathized with her desire to go to Cambridge after leaving school. She wanted to study medicine but her father didn't even want to hear about it; The idea that there were female doctors of hers disgusted her. This was in the mid-nineties of the last century, when it was still only relatively well-off and brave girls who went to universities and when many Victorian parents felt the same way my grandfather did about women in medicine.
Then Mum took a botany course at Girton. This must have seemed like a second best form of science to study, and she explains the fact that she rarely showed much interest in the subject in her later life. I can remember her identifying roadside flowers for us children on country walks, and she had some beautifully illustrated books about wildflowers that she appreciated, but which she rarely opened. However, her years at Cambridge were happy ones for her, as she forged lifelong friendships:
Study and tranquility together mingled: sweet recreation,
And the innocence that pleases the
most, with meditation.
Innocence indeed! Chocolate parties in university classrooms were the degree of dissipation that my mother and her friends allowed themselves (or her superiors allowed them) and they seemed perfectly happy that it was so.
In those days, Oxford and Cambridge, although admitting women to courses of study, did not award them degrees. My mother passed the exams necessary to obtain a degree, but she was already middle-aged when the rules were changed and she was able to write B.A. (Cantab) after her name.