Today Maria Sharpe Pearson (1853-1928) is hardly known. However, as the wife of Karl Pearson (1857-1936), Goldsmid Professor of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics (1884-1911) and Galton Professor of Eugenics (1911-1933) at UCL, Sharpe’s writings are kept in the UCL’s Pearson Papers, part of the university’s Special Collections. Sharpe played an important role in the radical discussions on gender roles under the auspices of the Men’s and Women’s Club, a club founded by Karl Pearson himself to discuss equality between the sexes. Sharpe and Pearson both had an interest in Ibsen’s work and in 1889 Sharpe published in The Westminster Review an essay ‘Henrik Ibsen: His Men and Women’. The published essay, of which the first page is featured here, are kept as part of UCL Collections alongside Sharpe’s manuscripts of the same article. 

Location: UCL Special Collections, Pearson Papers