Frances Hardcastle

Frances was born in Writtle, Essex. She came from a line of academics, with her father Henry Hardcastle, a barrister, and her maternal grandfather John Herschel, a scientist and astronomer.

Frances became a fellow of Girton College, Cambridge in 1888, where she obtained a Certificate in Mathematics. At this time women were allowed to attend lectures and sit exams but were not allowed to graduate.  

In 1892 she moved to the USA to become a graduate student at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania. While there, Hardcastle worked on translating Felix Klein’s work “Über Riemanns Theorie der algebraischen Functionen und ihrer Integrale” into English, publishing it in 1893 with the title “On Riemann's Theory of Algebraic Functions and Their Integrals: A Supplement to the Usual Treatises” 

Frances became one of the founding members of the American Mathematical Society in 1894. She had various fellowships in Mathematics during her time in the USA before returning to Girton College in 1894.  She had a particular interest in point groups – an area of algebraic geometry and published several papers on these. 

Frances was the lifelong companion of Dr Ethel Williams, also on our map. Frances moved to Newcastle in around 1909 and lived with Williams, where she became the joint secretary of the North-Eastern Federation of Women’s Suffrage Societies. She and Williams travelled to the International Congress of Women in 1919. They were passionate about Women’s rights, but disagreed with ‘the militant methods taken by the suffragettes’. Together they built a house in Stocksfield, Northumberland, and moved there on Ethel’s retirement in 1924.