English pioneer in the higher education for women, born on the 3rd of November 1814, the daughter of a rear-admiral. Both she and her sister Maria (Mrs. William Grey) took a keen interest in bettering women's equipment for educational work, and, in 1858, she published Intellectual Education and its Influence on the Character and Happiness of Women. Before that the sisters had written in collaboration a novel, Passion and Principle (1841), marked with that serious sense of the deficiencies in women's education, to remedy which they did so much, and Thoughts on Self-Culture addressed to Women (1850). In 1869 Emily Shirreff was for a short time honorary mistress of Girton College, and she served for many years on the council of that institution and of the Girls' Public Day School Company. She took a leading part in establishing and developing the Maria Grey Training College for teachers and in the work of the Froebel Society, of which she was the president. She was a firm believer in Froebel's system and wrote a short memoir of him, and several books on kindergarten methods. She died in London on the 20th of March 1897.