"My 25th birthday, how beastly to be a quarter of a century," Mary Gladstone wrote in her diary. And yet what an exciting time it was to have a birthday in Oxford. Mary's diary and twenty-fifth birthday letter reveals her participation in musical life at Oxford, and her close association with educational pioneers in the earliest days of Keble College and Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford, and Newnham and Selwyn Colleges, Cambridge. Women may not have been able to take degrees at Oxbridge, but their positions as sisters, wives and cousins allowed them frequent access to college parlors where they wielded influence as bright conversationalists and enthusiastic music-makers.
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