Edith Simcox

(1844 - 1901)

A Victorian scholar and social reformer who fashioned in Natural Law a comprehensive system of personal ethics, Edith Simcox worked days at a shirt-making cooperative she cofounded in 1875 to employ women in favorable working conditions. One customer was George Eliot, whom Simcox had met while reviewing Middlemarch upon its 1872 publication and become infatuated with “lover-wise”—so much so that she kept a journal for twenty-four years in which she recorded the turmoil of her unrequited feelings.