Lucy Wills went in September 1903 to The Cheltenham Ladies' College, which had been founded in 1854 by Dorothea Beale, a prominent Victorian pioneer of reform of women's education. Miss Beale was a supporter of women's suffrage, having been one of the signatories of John Stuart Mill's 1867 petition to Parliament to give women the vote, and was Principal of the College from 1858 until her death in 1906. Lucy Wills's elder sister Edith was in the same house, Glenlee, two years ahead of her.