Pernel Strachey

Pernel Strachey
portrait by Ray Strachey
Born	1876 Clapham Common
Died	1951 Gordon Square
Nationality	United Kingdom
Known for	head of Newnham College

Pernel Strachey or Joan Pernel Strachey (1876–1951) was an English scholar of French and a head of Newnham College.

Strachey was born in Clapham Common in London in 1876. She came from a large family led by Lieutenant General Sir Richard Strachey and the suffragist Jane Maria Strachey. Her mother was a friend of Millicent Garrett Fawcett who had co-founded Newnham College in Cambridge.

Strachey went to Allenswood School. She was then a scholar of French after initially studying history at Newnham College in 1895. Her course was modern and medieval languages, but she was talented in French. By 1900 she was lecturing at Royal Holloway College in London after briefly studying in Paris. She returned to her alma mater in 1905 and by 1917 she was leading the modern and medieval languages department. In 1921 she used her suffragist background to help lead a campaign to get real degrees for women at Girton College and Newnham. The campaign failed.

She became principal of the college in 1927. She used her friendship with the Bloomsbury Group and Virginia Woolf to get Woolf to deliver a talk in 1928. Woolf stayed at Newnham and her talk to the Newnham Arts Society was the basis for her essay A Room of One's Own. Strachey retired in 1941.

Strachey died in Gordon Square in London in 1951.

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