Frances Mary Buss, who began her teaching career at fourteen, was only twenty-three when she founded the North London Collegiate School, the forerunner and model of Girls' High Schools throughout the country. Her friend Dorothea Beale was for nearly fifty years Principal of Cheltenham Ladies College, which she changed from an insignificant local school into a school and college with a comprehensive teacher training department and with upwards of a thousand pupils. She was also the founder of St.Hilda's College, Oxford. Imbued with strong religious principles and endowed with immense energy