Ada Wallas or Ada (or "Audrey") Radford (10 December 1859 – 12 October 1934) was an English writer and teacher.

Life

Wallas was born in

Plymouth Plymouth () is a port city and unitary authority in South West England. It is located on the south coast of Devon, approximately south-west of Exeter and south-west of London. It is bordered by Cornwall to the west and south-west. Plymouth ...

in 1859. Her father was George David Radford who was a partner in a drapers in

Mannamead Mannamead is a suburb of Plymouth in the county of Devon, England. It was an affluent Victorian and early Edwardian suburb with wide avenues such as Seymour Road, grand villas and Thorn Park. There are conservation areas but the area has been ...

. Her mother Catherine Agnes had ten children and Wallas was the penultimate. Her non-conformist and close knit family sent her to

Plymouth High School for Girls Plymouth High School for Girls (PHSG) is a girls' grammar school founded in 1874. It is located on St Lawrence Road in Plymouth, Devon, England, close to Mutley Plain and Plymouth city centre. History In February 1874 the Devon and Cornwall Gi ...

and then on to Newnham College to study mathematics. She then taught for a year at Wimbledon High School before returning to Devon. She moved back to London in 1893 having kept house for her brother. She had a private income and she also was now a published writer after pieces had appeared in ''

The Yellow Book ''The Yellow Book'' was a British quarterly literary periodical that was published in London from 1894 to 1897. It was published at The Bodley Head Publishing House by Elkin Mathews and John Lane, and later by John Lane alone, and edited by the ...

'' and the '' Westminster Gazette''. On 18 December 1897, she married the socialist Graham Wallas. The following year they had a daughter . May had to be cared for when having diphtheria in 1910 and flu in 1917 when she too was at Newnham College. May obtained her doctorate at the London School of Economics, which her father had founded. She later went to lecture at Newnham. In 1898, Ada contributed poems to her brother Ernest Radford's publication ''Songs in the Whirlwind'' using the name Ada Radford. Her literary work waned after marriage; her first work after marriage was a children’s book ''The Land of Play'' published in 1906. According to historian Gillian Sutherland, Her work took on somewhat less radical matters after marriage though she remained invoked in community matters through involvement in mothers’ and school organisations. In 1929, she published ''Before the Bluestockings'' which included biographies that she had previously published. In the same year she published her early reminiscences under the title ''Daguerreotypes''. Wallas died in her house in Chelsea in 1934.Gillian Sutherland, ‘Wallas , Ada (1859–1934)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, April 201
accessed 26 Jan 2017
/ref>

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wallas, Ada 1859 births 1934 deaths 19th-century English women writers 20th-century English women writers Writers from Plymouth, Devon English women non-fiction writers Alumni of Newnham College, Cambridge People educated at Plymouth High School for Girls English biographers Women biographers