ALICE OTTLEY.t THIS is the memoir of a remarkable and
very attractive woman, who will have her own place in an impartial history of English education, if such is ever written. Miss Ottley was one of the moat distinguished among the women of gentle birth and fine culture who devoted their Eyes, in the second, half of the nineteenth century, to work in which they were to a large extent pioneers—the thorough training and education of girls. Not one of those women, heads of colleges and high schools, differing widely in opinions and ideals as well as in personal qualifications, bad a stronger influence on the lives and characters of her pupils than Alice Ottley.
The book that lies before us is full of proofs of this. It gives a detailed account of the founding, growth, and life of the Worcester School, which from its first small beginnings in 1883 till her death in 1912 was the centre of Miss Ottley's love and solicitude, and the object to which she devoted all her high powers, social, intellectual, and spiritual. She resigned! the head-mistress-ship in the spring of 1912, her health having at last failed under the pressure of long-continued work and anxiety. And we believe it is true that she had never lost sight of one among the great number of her "children" who had passed through the school in those twenty-nine years, and for whom her desire was that in every way "they should become the best that they were capable of being."
Religion, of course, was the mainspring and the guiding force of Miss Ottley's life and teaching, and Miss James's sympathetic memoir brings this out strongly. Nor does the' Bishop of Worcester say too much when he remarks in his Introduction that "had she lived in the Middle Ages . . . she might have ranked with the makers of women's religious life,'" for she bad the strength of mind, the originality, the practical
• The. Groats/a House at Cheteea. By Randall Davies. London : John Lane.
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t Altos Ott -First Head-Ilietrese of the Worceetrr High Sehrol for Girls. 1088- 191a Compiled•by Mary E. James. With an Introdnetiou by the Bishop of Worbiltere. With rortntits and Illustrations. London; Longumns and Co.
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wisdom, as well as the faith and the self-forgetting enthusiasm, which have always characterized the true saint and spiritual leader. These gifts, with the singular personal charm which was felt even by those who disagreed with her, made their mark far beyond the walls of her school and the lives of her pupils. What her fellow-citizens thought of her may be judged by the question asked some years ago—" Who is the moat influential person in Worcester P "—and the unanimous answer of a mixed assembly—" Miss Ottley." Her brother, Canon R. L. Ottley, the Regius Professor of Pastoral Theology at Oxford, throws some light in a few interesting pages on the qualities which made her public service so valuable: "An energetic, forceful, resolute character ; capable of great endurance, of steady persistence under difficulties ... a tenacity of purpose, a sturdy power of fighting, where questions of moral principle or educational efficiency were at stake . . . her idealism always tempered by an almost masculine common- sense."
The present memoir, though worthy of its subject, perhaps leaves something to be desired by those to whom Miss Ottley's social charm and rare friendship, independent of her work, mattered more especially. But, in any case, it will be valved as a sincere record of the life of one in whose finely touched nature, it is the simple truth to say, "grace and strength, tenderness and courage, gentleness and resolution, love and wisdom, were blended in no common measure."
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