Conditions Governing Access

The collection is open for research use.

Immediate Source of Acquisition

This collection was purchased from James Cummins bookseller by the Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia Library on 13 December 2023.

Biographical / Historical

Dr. Agnes Maude Royden (23 November 1876 – 30 July 1956), later known as Maude Royden-Shaw, was famous as an early twentieth-century campaigner for women's status in the ministry of the Church of England and preacher, suffragist, feminist, and anti-war activist.

She published at least fifty works in forty years, most of them polemical. Her pamphlets, sermons, and speeches range in topic through religion and Christianity, women's role in the Church , sexual morality and birth control, female suffrage and women's rights, pacifism, and national and international politics.

After lecturing at Oxford Univeristy Delegacy Scheme and executive leadership of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies and the London Society for Women's Suffrage, she established the interdenominational fellowship the Guildhouse in 1920, preached there, and published the monthly Guildhouse Fellowship. From the 1910s until the late 1940s, she published many letters to the editor of the Times as well as articles there.

Sources: https://orlando.cambridge.org/people/d953ed70-83ba-4602-a268-ce4998fb8ba5

Content Description

This collection contains one typed letter from Dr. Agnes Maude Royden (1876-1956) to Mrs.Bird. In the letter, she asks after a newborn, discusses the cold weather, her move from Sevenoaks to London, her loss of hearing, and updates on mutual acquaintances. Royden was a British suffragist, preacher, and lecturer who founded the Church League for Women's Suffrage in 1909 and founded the ecumenical Guildhouse in 1921, which became a cultural hub in London for fifteen years.

Royden wrote about love and friendships including same-sex relationships and was a strong supporter of greater social tolerance for homosexuals. (She publicly defended Radclyffe Hall's controversial lesbian novel "The Well of Loneliness" in 1929)

In this letter, she describes her feelings about having a condition of deafness due to her age, and how it compares with other people with deafness.

Subjects and Indexing Terms

• Deafness
• Presbycusis
• Religion
• Women -- Suffrage