Phoebe Sheavyn

Born in Atherstone, Warwickshire, in 1865, Phoebe Ann Beale Sheavyn became a British literary scholar, teacher, and feminist. She studied at University College Wales, Aberystwyth, where she is noted as the first woman student to earn an honours degree there in the 1880s.

After beginning her career in teaching, she held academic posts at Bryn Mawr College and Somerville College, Oxford, before joining the Victoria University of Manchester, where she later became a professor. She was also a founding member of the British Federation of University Women, reflecting her long-standing commitment to women's higher education.

Sheavyn is best remembered by readers for The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age, a study of how writers made their living in the age of Shakespeare. She also wrote Higher Education for Women in Great Britain, bringing together scholarship and advocacy in a way that still feels direct and purposeful.