Ada Wallas


Ada Wallas or Ada Radford was an English writer and teacher.

Life

Wallas was born in Plymouth in 1859. Her father was George David Radford who was a partner in a drapers in Mannamead. Her mother Catherine Agnes had ten children and Wallas was the. Her non-conformist and close knit family sent her to Plymouth High School for Girls 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 and the Westminster Gazette.
In 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.
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.