She later mentioned as formative texts of her youth, read for herself and not for school, Webster and the other Elizabethan or Jacobean dramatists. She was also a regular at the National Film Theatre .

She progressed on her own later to other languages such as German, Portuguese and Arabic, and to studies with Thomas Wright which included astronomy, mathematics, and ancient civilization and culture. Much has been made of her various aids to study or at least to keeping awake, like snuff-taking, fastening a wet towel round her head, and chewing green tea. Samuel Johnson once implied in conversation that she had a better command of ancient Greek than any (male) scholar he knew.

The questionable contemporary accounts of SC 's early education make much of early self-motivated study.

Hester's early reading included romances such as those of Madeleine de Scudéry . She taught herself modern languages, music, drawing, and some Latin. At fifteen she was reading theology.

The skills which CC learned for herself were masculine ones, like medicine, gardening, grooming and schooling horses, and handling a gun. When a neighbour deprived her of one gun, she took another and shot down the woman's chimneys.

As well as a basic school education, the young TC (who had been thought slow as a small child) taught himself an astonishing range of abstruse subjects, mostly historical, by reading in circulating libraries and bookshops: anywhere where books might be used without buying them. His early reading included, along with the medievalising of James Macpherson , Thomas Percy , and Horace Walpole , Elizabeth Cooper 's historical anthology, The Muses Library, 1737.

At fifteen she read Paradise Lost (with her brother's encouragement) and was delighted with its grandeur and sublimity, but was bold enough to criticise Milton for assert[ing] the superiority of his own sex in rather too lordly a manner. Two years later she told Convers, Johnson is my favorite among all his contemporaries. I know of no author in the English language that writes like him. She was soon deep in Scott and Byron , but had not yet apparently discovered women writers.

By the time Agatha was born, Clara Miller believed that girls ought not to learn to read before the age of eight. Defiantly, Agatha taught herself to read at five. She eagerly devoured Lewis Carroll 's Through the Looking Glass, Louisa May Alcott 's Little Women, and the Old Testament. Her favourite books by Victorian children's writers included those of Mary Louisa Molesworth and Frances Hodgson Burnett , and Edith Nesbit 's The Railway Children. She went on to discover books by Dickens , George Eliot , Jules Verne , Charlotte and Emily Brontë , and Disraeli .

After completing school, JHC was deeply impressed by Robert Chambers , who encouraged her self-education by telling her that real education begins when one leaves school . . . [it] is better than any amount of school learning. She took the advice to heart. She began with the study of Henry Buckle 's History of Civilization in England, and proceeded to the Rev. James Cranbrook 's works on political economy, logic, and metaphysics, including Credibilia: or, Discourses on Questions of Christian Faith, 1866.

Later, following the sisters' move to Italy, they studied together in the libraries there, particularly in Florence.AMC was self-taught in astronomy. Between their travels and their studies, the sisters acquired a knowledge of Greek, Latin, French, German, and Italian.Ellen also became familiar with Arabic.

She continued into adulthood her study of a range of subjects.

MC writes, No Learning ever was bestow'd on me; / My Life was always spent in Drudgery. But she learned to read very early, and continued learning into adult life. She later listed her reading as including solid historical works: chronicles by Speed and Baker , Foxe 's Acts and Monuments (which included the writings of Anne Askew ), and Josephus , historian of the Jews.

ACunfortunately left no comment on her early education. It used to be believed that she had tutors, but it is quite possible that she largely taught herself, from books, French, Latin, Greek, and even some Hebrew. She very early developed an interest in philosophy. So, as Marjorie Hope Nicolson wrote, eagerly and constantly did she study that the members of her family always attributed her mysterious malady to overzealous reading. But until she was seventeen or eighteen, her study was without order or coherence, and her mind a storehouse of ideas and facts, jostling each other in increasing complexity. She was in the highest degree a child of the Renaissance, vivid, alert, eager, taking all knowledge to be her province, flashing here and there with brilliant lights, many-sided, myriad-minded. Her sex forbade any organized education, which might have helped her to bring order out of this chaos.

View reference

Conway, Anne et al. The Conway Letters. Editor Hutton, Sarah, Revised, Clarendon Press, 1992.

5

Sarah Hutton reconstructs AC 's philosophical education through her correspondence with Henry More (of which her side is mostly lost).

Judging from the books which gave CC the idea for Battleridge, she cultivated a taste for obscure historical and religious texts.

EC was almost entirely self-educated.

After her sister's death, CFC immersed herself in her studies. Between 1803 and 1826 she learned several languages: Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Anglo-Saxon, ancient Egyptian, and German, among others. She studied a wide array of topics, teaching herself philosophy, theology, law, history, and a variety of different scientific fields. This driven attitude towards her studies was motivated by the knowledge that unless she worked to improve herself academically, she would never be taken seriously because of her gender. She was proud of her knowledge and her work ethic but careful not to flaunt it; as she wrote once to a friend, where even any common attainments are looked at with astonishment, would it not savour something of ostentation to trumpet forth Latin, Greek, and Hebrew in the ears of those who scarcely know that such languages exist?

Nothing is directly known of LSC 's education, but her range of literary reference shows her to have been extremely well-read. She also knew a number of languages: French, Italian, Latin, and Persian.

IC did not attend any school beyond the age of ten, but she was a keen reader of English literature. She was largely self-educated.

HC learned some German from Clara.

AD 's mastery of Latin and her respectable knowledge of Greek were self-acquired, though Horace Walpole had a hand in her education. She studied sculpture from childhood, being taught by Giuseppe Ceracchi , John Bacon , and William Cruikshank , who taught her anatomy. Biographer P. S. Noble relates an anecdote (which has Anne provoked into her first attempts at sculpture by scepticism as to her capability expressed by the philosopher Hume ) which seems to be aimed at presenting her artistic endeavours as something other than serious study.

SD was still at school, aged sixteen, when a friend persuaded her that they should use free tickets given the school by the local repertory theatre. At first the theatre was boring (its main attraction was under-age drinking in the interval), but the repertoire produced constant novelty, and soon SD found she couldn't wait for the next [play]. After leaving school and getting a job, she went to the theatre every week, gradually abandoning the West End for fringe theatre, both feminist and mainstream political. She was influenced at this time by a pronouncement of Doris Lessing that one's life needs putting in order.

During her years in her husband's country, ED made a serious study of Persian poetry.

During summer vacations, she learned German from her brother Wilse (Hugh Wilson) and immersed herself in his Washington College books.

Her studies as an adult included such natural sciences as astronomy. In 1738 she described herself as blushing and looking excessive silly when caught privately studying cosmography; but she does not say that appearing silly made her desist.