Brief Venture

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 287, 22 December 1944, Page 15

Brief Venture

R. AGNES MAUDE ROYDEN is a small, frail woman, who uses a cane for walking — she has been lame from -childhood-and who is also an English ‘theologian. She started as a social worker in Liverpool, and then became Lecturer in English in the Oxford University Extension Delagacy. Sh e |

worked tor womens suffrage s0c ieties, edited the journal The Common Cause, wrote several books, and made two tours to America. Then she became a _ licensed lay reader of the Church of England, and was later granted a_ special licence to preach,

the only one of its kind. In 1920, with Dr. Percy Dearmer, y she founded a church of her own at KenSington, the Fellowship. Services, to which people of any creed could come, Though she was never ordained, she was the first woman in Great Britain to receive the degree of Doctor of Divinity, and the first,woman to become a pastor in the Church of England. And then, at the age of 68, after a life fuli enough to satisfy the most ambitious career woman, she was marriedto the former Reétor of St. Botolph’s; Bishopsgate, the Rev. G. W. Hudson Shaw, aged 80. But unlike most of her ventures, this one came to a sudden end, for news has just reached New Zealand of the death of her husband. To her falls the experience-unusual for a woman of her age — of being, within three months, single, married, and widowed. ;