Early Life
Born Shirley Vivian Teresa Brittain Catlin, Williams is the daughter of a political scientist and philosopher Sir George Catlin, and the feminist and pacifist writer Vera Brittain. She was educated at various primary schools including Mrs Spencer's School in Brechin Place, South Kensington, and Christchurch Elementary School in Chelsea, Talbot Heath School in Bournemouth, St Paul's Girls' School, London, and Somerville College, Oxford, where she was an Open Scholar. As a member of the OUDS she toured the USA playing the role of Cordelia in Shakespeare's King Lear. She was the first woman to chair the Oxford University Labour Club (1950).
After graduating as a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, Politics and Economics she was a Fulbright Scholar and studied at Columbia University in New York City. On returning to Britain, she began her career as a journalist. In 1960, she became General Secretary of the Fabian Society.
Read more about this topic: Shirley Williams
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“There is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)