The Sybil Campbell Collection

The Sybil Campbell Collection is a welcome addition to Goodenough College’s own library collections.

To access the Collection, College Members and visiting researchers are able to locate documents using the new Sybil Campbell Collection online catalogue (developed by Jose Lopez Blanco, Faculty Librarian at the University of South Wales), and then contact the College Librarian to arrange to view the materials.

Origins of the Collection

The Collection was established in 1928 as the Crosby Hall Library and became a charity in 1955. It was moved to a purpose built room in Crosby Hall in 1959 as the Sybil Campbell Library. From 1992 to 1995 it was in storage before being re-opened in 1998 at 28 Great James Street in Bloomsbury. In June 2006, after intensive work on cataloguing and conservation (aided by generous grants from the Pilgrim Trust and the Charitable Foundation), it was moved to the University of Winchester, where it remained until late 2024.

About the Collection

The Collection now contains around 8,000 items, reflecting the entry of women into the professions in the first half of the 20th century and focusing on the educational aspirations of the period and the part graduate women played nationally and internationally.

Items in the Collection include material relating to women’s writing and women’s history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – women’s education, their personal libraries, biography, autobiography, women in wartime, the support the British Federation of University Women (BFUW) gave to refugees and so on.

There are reports and publications of the BFUW (founded 1907) and the International Federation of University Women (founded 1920). It contains some records of past BFWG Award Holders and BFWG Charitable Foundation Grant Holders. There are records of the Women’s National Commission and interesting material on Crosby Hall and Chelsea.

The general material includes philosophy, history, literary criticism, fiction, poetry, travel, art, crafts and much more, some of it bequeathed by early members of the BFUW. Some books are interesting for their provenance. Material was donated by significant figures of the 1920s and 1930s – Sybil Campbell, Ivy Davison, John Galsworthy, L P Hartley, Harold Laski, Eleanor Rathbone, Alys and Bertrand Russell, Caroline Spurgeon, Lytton Strachey, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Virginia and Leonard Woolf to name some of them.

Media Articles – University of Winchester – who was Sybil Campbell?