St Hilda's College, Oxford

Val McDermid is a Scottish crime writer, best known for a series of suspense novels starring her most famous creation, Dr. Tony Hill. McDermid comes... from Kirkcaldy, Fife, and was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she was the first student from a state school in Scotland , and became President of the Junior Common Room. After graduation she became a journalist, and worked briefly as a dramatist. However, her first success as a novelist, Report for Murder: The First Lindsay Gordon Mystery, did not appear until 1987. McDermid's notable characters are a lesbian journalist, Lindsay Gordon; a private investigator, Kate Brannigan; and a psychologist, Tony Hill, who suffers from sexual dysfunction. Her books mainly fall into three series: Lindsay Gordon, Kate Brannigan, and, beginning in 1995, the Tony Hill and Carol Jordan series, the first entry in which, The Mermaids Singing, won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel of the Year. The Hill/Jordan series has been adapted for television under the name Wire in the Blood, starring Robson Green.
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Cecil Blanche Woodham-Smith was a British historian and biographer. She wrote four popular history books, each dealing with a different aspect of... the Victorian era. Cecil Woodham-Smith was born in 1896 in Tenby, Wales. Her family, the Fitzgeralds, were a well-known Irish family, one of her ancestors being Lord Edward Fitzgerald, hero of the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Her father Colonel James FitzGerald had served in the Indian Army during the Sepoy Mutiny; her mother's family included General Sir Thomas Picton, a distinguished soldier who was killed at Waterloo. She attended the Royal School for Officers' Daughters in Bath, until her expulsion for taking unannounced leave for a trip to the National Gallery. She finished her schooling at a French convent and afterwards entered St Hilda's College, Oxford. She graduated with a second-class degree in English in 1917. In 1928 she married George Ivon Woodham-Smith, a distinguished London solicitor with whom she had an exceptionally close and deep relationship until his death in 1968.
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Hermione Lee, CBE FBA FRSL is President of Wolfson College, Oxford and was lately Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature in the University of... Oxford and Professorial Fellow of New College. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature. Hermione Lee grew up in London where her father was a GP. She was educated at the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle, City of London School for Girls, and Queen's College, London. She took a first-class degree in English Literature at St Hilda's College, Oxford in 1968 and an MPhil at St Cross College, Oxford in 1970. She has taught at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, at the University of Liverpool and at the University of York, from 1977 to 1998, where she had a personal Chair in the Department of English and Related Literature, and where she received an Honorary DLitt in 2007. Since 1998 she has been the Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature and the first woman professorial Fellow of New College, Oxford.
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Sheila Rowbotham is a British socialist feminist theorist and writer. Rowbotham was born in Leeds, the daughter of a salesman for an engineering... company and an office clerk From an early age, she was deeply interested in history. Rowbotham was to write that traditional political history “left her cold”, but she credited Olga Wilkinson, one of her teachers with encouraging her interest in social history by showing that history “belonged to the present, not to the history textbooks”. Rowbotham attended St Hilda’s College at Oxford and then the University of London. She began her working life as a teacher in comprehensive schools and institutes of higher or Adult education. While attending St. Hilda’s College, Rowbotham found her syllabus with its heavy focus on political history to be of no interest to her. Through her involvement in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and various socialist circles including the Labour Party’s youth wing, the Young Socialists, Rowbotham was introduced to Karl Marx's ideas. Already on the left, Rowbotham was converted to Marxism.
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