author
Eleanor F. (Eleanor Frances) Jourdain
1863–1924
Best remembered today for the mysterious Versailles incident, she was also a serious Oxford academic who led St Hugh’s College in the early twentieth century. Her life brought together scholarship, leadership, and a lasting brush with the strange.
2 Audiobooks
An Adventure
by C. A. E. (Charlotte Anne Elizabeth) Moberly, Eleanor F. (Eleanor Frances) Jourdain
On the theory of the infinite in modern thought : Two introductory studies
by Eleanor F. (Eleanor Frances) Jourdain
About the author
Eleanor Frances Jourdain was an English academic, writer, and college head, born in 1863. She studied and taught in a period when higher education for women was still fighting for space, and she went on to become Principal of St Hugh’s College, Oxford, serving from 1915 until 1924.
She is often associated with the so-called Moberly–Jourdain incident, a famous and much-debated account of a visit to Versailles that she and Charlotte Anne Moberly later described in An Adventure. That unusual episode kept her name in print, but it can overshadow the rest of her career: she was also a committed educator and an influential figure in women’s academic life at Oxford.
Jourdain died in 1924. The combination of college leadership, authorship, and the enduring mystery around An Adventure has made her an especially intriguing figure for readers interested in the borderland between scholarship and the supernatural.