“A Revelation and a Delight”: Nineteenth-Century Cambridge Women, Academic Collaboration, and the Cultural Work of Extracurricular Writing

This article surveys the extracurricular writing of the first women to attend Girton and Newnham Colleges at Cambridge University. It argues that such student writing did more than promote intellectual formation or rehearse new knowledge; indeed, it changed institutional culture and the social horizons for middle-class women’s lives.