A year later, Marshall was deep in conversation with Henry Sidgwick in Anne Clough’s sitting room on Regent Street, discussing “high subjects” when he felt someone staring at him.57 The young woman who sat with her sewing untouched in her lap looking toward them had a “brilliant complexion,” “deep set large eyes,” and masses of mahogany hair “which goes back in a great wave and is very loosely pinned up behind.”58 Later, someone said of the twenty-year-old Mary Paley, “She is Princess Ida.” The eponymous heroine of the Gilbert and Sullivan opera had “forsworn the world, / And, with a band of women, shut herself / Within a lonely country house, and there / Devotes herself to stern philosophies!” Mary had just broken off her engagement to a handsome but stupid army officer to join a handful of female pioneers seeking a Cambridge education. Her part in this “outrageous proceeding” was not a rejection of men, or of the usual terms of marriage. “He who desires to gain their favor must / Be qualified to strike their teeming brains, / And not their hearts! / They’re safety matches, sir. / And they light only on the knowledge box.”59
Mary went to one of Marshall’s lectures at the coach house at Grovedodge and listened, enchanted, as he rhapsodized over Kant, Bentham, and Mill. “I then thought I had never seen such an attractive face,” she confessed, captivated by his “brilliant eyes.” She went to a dance at Marshall’s college, and, emboldened by his “melancholy” look, she asked him to dance “the Lancers.” Ignoring his protestations that he didn’t know how, she led him through the complex steps only to be “shocked at my own boldness.”60 Before long she was among the regular guests at his “Sunday evening parties” in his rooms at St. John’s, where he served her tea, crumpets, sandwiches, and oranges and showed her his “large collection of portraits arranged in groups of Philosophers, Poets, Artists . . .”
Possibly Mary reminded Marshall of Maggie Tulliver, the intelligent but math-phobic heroine of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, who wanted to learn “the Euclid” like her brother, Tom.61 At the time, Eliot’s novel was Marshall’s favorite. Meeting Mary Paley and her best friend, Mary Kennedy, in the street one day, Marshall proposed—not marriage, but something more outrageous. The young professor wanted his two best students to take the Moral Sciences Tripos, the final examination in political economy, politics, and philosophy that male undergraduates had to take to get a degree. This was a far more ambitious project than acquiring “general cultivation” by attending lectures in literature, history, and logic, Mary’s original object in coming to Cambridge.
The suggestion was also bolder than anything proposed by other education reformers whose main interest lay in raising the level of secondary-school teaching. “Remember, so far you have been competing with cart horses,” Marshall warned, “but for the Tripos it will be with racehorses.” He promised that he and Sidgwick would coach her. According to Mary Kennedy, “He explained that this would mean at least three years’ study, specializing in one or two subjects. We accepted the challenge lightly, not realizing what we were undertaking.”
Like Marshall, the young woman who would accept the challenge came from a strict evangelical household. Mary Paley’s great-grandfather was William Paley, the archdeacon of Carlisle and author of The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy. Mary’s father was the rector of Ufford, near Stamford, about forty miles northwest of Cambridge. A “staunch Radical” who opposed fox hunting, horse racing, and High Church ritual, he refused to talk to neighboring clergymen and forbade his daughters Dickens and dolls. Mary recalled, “My sister and I were allowed dolls until one tragic day when our father burnt them as he said we were making them into idols and we never had any more.”
Mary’s father was nonetheless a more tolerant, better-educated, and more affluent man than William Marshall. Mary grew up in a “rambling old house, its front covered with red and white roses and looking out on a lawn with forest trees as a background, and a garden with long herbaceous borders and green terraces.” The Paley household was a hive of activity: rounders, archery, croquet, excursions to London, summer holidays in Hunstanton and Scarborough. “We had a father who took part in work and play and who was interested in electricity and photography,” Mary recalled. Her mother “was full of initiative and always bright and amusing.” In 1862 Mary was taken to London to tour the Second Great Exhibition. Although Charles Dickens was taboo, Mary read Arabian Nights, Gulliver’s Travels, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Greek and Shakespearean plays, and the novels of Sir Walter Scott, also favorites of Marshall’s.
When the Cambridge Higher Local Examination for Women over Eighteen was established in 1869, Tom Paley encouraged Mary to take it over the objections of her mother. After she succeeded brilliantly and broke off her engagement to the army officer, her father allowed her to go to Cambridge to live “when such a thing had never been done before.” Anne Jemima Clough, a friend of Sidgwick’s and one of the leaders of the women’s education movement, was opening a residence for a handful of female students. Mary later wrote, “My father was proud and pleased and his admiration for Miss Clough overcame his objections to sending his daughter to Cambridge (in those days an outrageous proceeding).”62
In October 1871, Mary joined Miss Clough and four other young women at 74 Regent Street. The Cambridge community was wholly unprepared for coeducation. Since mixed classes were “improper,” sympathetic dons had to be recruited to repeat their regular lectures separately for the women, and Miss Clough, as chaperone, had to sit through them all. The “strong impulse towards liberty among the young women attracted by the movement” and the “unfortunate appearance” of the pretty ones were chronic sources of anxiety. Mary, who was just entering her “pre-Raphaelite period” and had papered her rooms in William Morris designs, was especially troublesome. She dressed as if she were a figure in an Edward Burne-Jones painting, in sandals, capes, and flowing gowns. An amateur watercolorist, she favored jewel tones and once covered her tennis dress with Virginia creeper and pomegranates.
Mary began to go regularly. Earnest as well as artistic, with a quick facility for “curves,” the graphs that Marshall employed to illustrate the interactions of supply and demand, Mary surprised herself by winning the essay prize. She was thrilled by Marshall’s bold proposal that she take the Tripos, and the long comments he wrote on her weekly papers in red ink became “a great event.”
Mary Paley took the Moral Sciences Tripos in December 1874. Until the eve of the examination, it was unclear whether the university examiners would be willing to let her sit for it. One was considered “very obdurate.” Although they grudgingly agreed to grade her examination, they refused to grant her the highest mark. “At the Examiners’ Meeting there was at that time no chairman to give a casting vote, and as two voted me first class and two second class I was left hanging, as Mr. Sidgwick said, ‘between heaven and hell,’ ” she later recalled. Still, her triumph turned Paley into a local celebrity.
Her time at Cambridge seemingly having run out, Mary returned to the family home in Ufford. There she promptly organized a series of extension lectures for women—“off my own bat!”—in nearby Stamford. She also agreed, at the suggestion of a Professor Stuart at Cambridge, to write a textbook on political economy for use in the extension courses. Then she got a letter from Sidgwick asking whether she could take over Marshall’s economics lectures at Newnham, where Miss Clough had assembled about twenty students.
At thirty-two, Marshall was one of the “advanced liberals” at Cambridge University. He wore his hair fashionably long, sported a handlebar mustache, and no longer dressed like a buttoned-up young minister. He had joined the recently founded Cambridge Reform Club and read the Bee Hive, a radical labor magazine.
In the spring of 1874, a farmworkers’ strike provoked a bitter quarrel between radicals and conservatives at Cambridge. Trade unions were then relatively novel, having only just been legalized. The National Agricultural Laborers’ Union, a radical new organization under the leadership of Joseph Arch, had sprung up in dozens of East Anglian villages the previous fall. The laborers demanded higher wages and shorter hours as well as the franchise and reform of the land laws.63 Strikes erupted all around Cambridge. Determined to “crush the rebellion,” farmers banded together