Apr., 1890 . 
CONSTANCE C. W. NADEN. 
73 
CONSTANCE C. W. NADEN: 
A MEMOIR. 
Part I. 
“ Sigh not 1 so young! ’—‘such promise !’—‘Ah ! a flower 
That longer life had sunned to fruit of gold.’ 
Be still and see!—God’s year, and day, and hour, 
By lapse of mortal minutes is not told.” 
Ilicet , Sir Edwin Arnold. 
Miss Naden is dead ! Such were the sorrowful words 
spoken with “ bated breath,” and sympathetically passed on 
by the few intimate friends who received them about mid¬ 
day on Tuesday, the 24th of December last, with a feeling 
akin to that “ hoping against hope ” which mortals are prone 
to cling to, peradventure they might by any possibility be 
afterwards contradicted. Alas! they were but too true, for 
their verification appeared in the evening journals, 
“And sadly fell our Christmas-eve,” 
as we realised the full force of the sudden and unexpected 
blow that had deprived the world of a fine—possibly an 
original—thinker, Birmingham of one of its most gifted 
daughters, our Sociological Section of its most distinguished 
worker, and the writer of these lines of a warmlv attached 
friend. 
It is an exceptionally rare privilege to record the higher 
intellectual, and especially the philosophical, achievements of 
women, although our present educational system—in which, 
thanks largely to the influence of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s 
work on education, and to the persistent and devoted labours 
of Professor Huxley, science has now a place—will doubtless 
develop more numerous instances in the future; but those 
who were privileged to know and understand Constance Naden 
and her aims and writings and powers best, presaged for her 
a future second, perhaps, only to George Eliot herself. A 
comparison, however, between the two ladies is scarcely 
possible—the latter died at 61, having completed her work— 
the former at 31, having scarcely begun it. Miss Naden had 
certainly the advantage of a better education, and she gave 
substantial evidence in the good work which she left behind 
her of far better that might have been forthcoming in the 
future. One point is very interesting to record—the early 
Evangelical training of both was somewhat similar, and they 
both subsequently exchanged the old for the new standpoint. 
