Pauline Gregg

Pauline Gregg (1909–2006) was one of the first generations of women who seized the opportunity to combine higher education, political activism and a distinguished career with family life. She won a place at the London School of Economics and later wrote ‘It was as if someone had opened the door to an enchanted life. My socialism had a focus, a new meaning.’ She married Russell Meiggs, a classics fellow at Balliol College, Oxford. She found housework dull and instead would cycle every day to the Bodleian Library where she continued her research on the seventeenth century. Her doctorate on the Leveller leader, John Lilburne, became the biography Free-Born John. A Social and Economic History of Britain became a standard reference work. She also wrote biographies of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell. C.V. Wedgwood described the former as ‘the fullest and most carefully compiled that we are ever likely to see.’ Her last years were spent writing a novel, the story of Anthony Sedley. I am aware of how much research she did into original pamphlets, letters and news-sheets which have survived from that articulate age to reveal a sensitive man who is deeply troubled by the horror of war. It has been my great joy and challenge, as her younger daughter, to bring this story to print.