Jane Senior

Who was Jane Senior?

Jane Nassau Senior was Britain's first female civil servant, and co-founder of the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants.

Senior was born Jane Elizabeth Hughes at Uffington on 10 December 1828, daughter of John Hughes and the only sister of the author Thomas Hughes and five other brothers. She married Nassau John Senior on 10 August 1848 at Shaw Church. Her relief work with soldiers returning from the Franco-Prussian War led to the foundation of the National Society for Aid to Sick and Wounded in War in 1870, forerunner of the British Red Cross; and her work with impoverished children in Surrey led to her appointment in 1873, as an assistant inspector of workhouses. Senior was a friend and correspondent of the novelist George Eliot.

She died of 'cancer of the womb' and exhaustion on 24 March 1877, aged 48; and is buried in Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey.