Phoebe Sheavyn

Phoebe Ann Beale Sheavyn (16 September 1865 – 7 January 1968) was a British literary scholar and feminist. She was a professor at Victoria University of Manchester. She was a founding member of the British Federation of University Women.

Life Sheavyn was born in 1865 in Atherstone. She was the fifth child of eight siblings, daughter of Jane Elizabeth Sheavyn, (born Farmer) and William Sale Sheavyn. The family lived above their draper's store in Atherstone. She began her career as a teacher before she became a governess to an architect's family.

Her employer tutored her and encouraged her to take university entrance exams and she obtained a scholarship from the College of Aberystwyth in Wales. She graduated at age 24, and taught English from 1889 to 1892 at the Haberdashers' School for Girls in the London Borough of Lewisham. She returned in England in 1896, worked for a year with the philologist Joseph Wright on the English Dialect Dictionary. In 1897 she was appointed by Agnes Catherine Maitland as a Resident Tutor at Somerville College, Oxford. She was the first person appointed to this position who was not from Oxford or Cambridge.

Sheavyn is one of the pioneers of the British Federation of University Women, and physiologist Winifred Cullis. The three of them are creditted with being the federation's de facto executive during the first few years. the women's halls of residence founded in 1900.

She was a member of the university senate in 1912. She resigned before 1917 from her duties at Ashburne Hall. She retired in 1925. She moved to Selly Oak, a district of Birmingham, started painting using equipment supplied by her friend Margery Fry. She made landscapes and flowers, and latterly learned Scrabble. Aspects of this work are subject to criticism, particularly in relation to the exclusion of certain Elizabethan authors, but his book, when first published in 1909, is regarded as one of the first studies in English literary criticism 1.

She died at her home in Selly Oak aged 102 on 7 January 1968. An extension to Ashburne Hall was named after Sheavyn. Sheavyn House is detached, self-catering and en-suite and it was opened in 1994.