Winifred Gerin Part II

Winifred was intelligent and loved literature and history,and she became a student at Cambridge…Her brother Roger was considered more academic minded. She was keen to have a university education, which was still very rare for girls of any class. However when she started to study history at Cambridge, she found it more difficult than she had anticipated. She was romantic minded and loved history for its thrilling stories. When she found herself expected to study dull aspects of constitutional history, it was a struggle for her. She was not able to put aside personal likes and dislikes, and achieve an impartial viewpoint. She persuaded her father to let her change from history, to studying French. Mr Bourne was concerned about his finances and he wanted his children all to be able to earn a living. Though he was comfortably off, he worried particularly about the care of Roger, who would need a trust fund to maintain him in a good and well run mental hospital. Winifred talked about getting a job as a teacher... However, when her college career was over, she stayed home and did not look for a paid job. The job she really cared about was writing, and she was determined if possible to achieve a career was a writer. She was never interested in writing novels, saying that she could not think of plots. So she concentrated on poetry and plays, and spent a few years, going on with her reading of literature, and starting to write…She wrote a play about Fanny Burney, who was a contemporary of Jane Austen- and a novelist.