Maud Darwin

Martha Haskins, Lady Darwin (

Biographical notes

She was born as Martha Haskins du Puy in 1861 in

She twice rejected the marriage proposals of Henry Martyn Taylor.^[3] However, while travelling in Italy, she met up with George Darwin, son of the naturalist Charles Darwin, who, although a member of her social circle, had commenced his travels independently. They became engaged there.

She married Darwin in 1884 in Erie, Pennsylvania, in an wedding lavishly described by The New York Times.^[4] The Jebbs were able to join them.

In 1885, the couple bought Newnham Grange in Cambridge. They had five children:

• Gwen Raverat (1885–1957), the artist.
• Charles Galton Darwin (1887–1962), the physicist.
• Margaret Elizabeth Darwin (1890–1974) who, like her mother, was wife of a
  Sir Geoffrey Keynes
  .
• William Robert Darwin (1894–1970), known as "Billy", a London stockbroker
• Leonard Darwin (born and died in 1899).

In Cambridge, she was elected to the Ladies Dining Society that had been founded by Louise Creighton and Kathleen Lyttleton in 1890. Other members included the economist Mary Paley Marshall, the classicist Margaret Verrall, the Irish suffragist Mary Ward, former Newnham lecturer Ellen Wordsworth Darwin, the mental health campaigner Ida Darwin, Baroness Eliza von Hügel, and her aunt Caroline Jebb (née Reynolds; then Slemmer).

She became Lady Darwin on her husband's knighthood in 1905; and was widowed in 1912. She died at Newnham Grange in 1947 and was given an obituary in The Times,^[5] which noted her campaigning for women police officers. She was cremated at Cambridge Crematorium on February 10, 1947; her husband is buried in Trumpington Extension Cemetery in Cambridge with their daughter Gwen (Raverat); also baby son Leonard Darwin.^{[citation needed]}

Her daughter Gwen's childhood memoir