PREFACE
There are several reasons why it has seemed worth while to write the life of Sophia Jex-Blake at some length.
1. She was one of the people who really do live. In the present day a woman is fitted into her profession almost as a man is. Sixty years ago a highly dowered girl was faced by a great venture, a great quest. The life before her was an uncharted sea. She had to find her self, to find her way, to find her work. In many respects youth was incomparably the most interesting period of a life history.
2. S. J.-B. has left behind her (as probably no woman of equal power has done) the record of this quest. She was a born chronicler: almost in her babyhood she struggled laboriously to get on to paper her doings and dreams; and she was truthful to a fault. We have here the kind of thing that is constantly “idealised” in present day fiction,—have it in actual contemporary record,—with the added interest that here the story begins in an old-world conservative medium, and passes through the life of the modern educated working girl into the history of a great movement, of which the chronicler was indeed magna pars. The reader will see how more and more as the years went on S. J.-B.’s motto became “Not me, but us,” till one is tempted to say that she was the movement, that she stood, as it were, for women.
3. That, so to speak, was her “job”; but she never grew one-sided; never forgot the man’s point of view. No woman ever took a saner and wider view of human affairs.
4. In spite of the heavy strain thrown by conflicting outlook and ideals on the relation between parents and child, the reader will see in the following pages how that relationship was preserved. This is perhaps the most remarkable thing in the whole history, and it is full of significance and helpful suggestion for us all in these critical days.
5. And lastly, it proved impossible to write the life in any other way. When S. J.-B. was a young woman, Samuel Laurence was asked by her parents to make a crayon drawing of her. After some hours’ work, he threw down his pencil. “I must get you in oils or not at all,” he said.
Those words have often been in the mind of the author of this book.