Frances Buss

Who was Frances Buss?

Frances Mary Buss was a headmistress and an English pioneer of women's education.

The daughter of Robert William Buss, a painter and etcher, and his wife, Frances Fleetwood, Buss was one of six of their ten children to survive into adulthood. Her grandparents, whom she was visiting in Aldersgate, sent her to a private school housed in the most basic accommodation "...to get me out of the way". Next she was sent to a similar school in Kentish Town which she remembered as simply consisting of children learning Murray's Grammar. Aged 10 she attended a more advanced school in Hampstead; by the age of fourteen she herself was teaching there and by sixteen she was occasionally left in charge of the school.

Her father's career as an artist being at times unsuccessful, to help the family finances her mother set up a private school in Clarence Road, Kentish Town, in 1845, at which Frances assisted, and which was based on the ideas of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. During 1848–9, she attended evening lectures at the newly opened Queen's College in Harley Street, London. She was taught by F. D. Maurice, Charles Kingsley, and R. C. Trench, and gained certificates in French, German and Geography. To Dorothea Beale, a contemporary at Queen's, she described the education she had gained there as opening ‘a new life to me, I mean intellectually’.