Enriqueta Augustina Rylands - at Longford Hall, Stretford

At Longford Hall, Stretford

Some time after 1860, Enriqueta became companion to Martha, the wife of wealthy Manchester merchant John Rylands. In 1875, eight months after Martha's death, Enriqueta married John Rylands. The marriage was childless but two children were adopted: Arthur Forbes and Maria Castiglioni. When John Rylands died in 1888, Enriqueta as the inheritor of the major part of his estate became a major shareholder of his family firm and in the Manchester Ship Canal.

In memory of her husband, Enriqueta founded the John Rylands Library. She admired the design of Basil Champneys's library for Mansfield College, Oxford, and contracted him to develop something similar, on a more lavish scale. The library was inaugurated on 6 October 1899, the anniversary of her marriage. On the same day, she was admitted to the Freedom of the City of Manchester, the first woman to be so honoured. She was committed to many philanthropic and missionary causes and bequeathed much of her wealth to educational and medical institutions (including the Victoria University of Manchester).

In later life she was affected by rheumatic symptoms and spent frequent periods convalescing overseas. In 1894, she purchased a villa in Torquay where she died 14 years later. Following her funeral in Stretford, Manchester, she was cremated and the ashes interred in the vault where her husband had been buried twenty years earlier in the Southern Cemetery, Manchester.