Breadcrumbs

Somerville Stories

People who graduate from Somerville go on to a rich variety of futures.  Our graduates include statespeople, and notably two prime ministers, each one the first woman to be prime minister of her country.  They also include the first and only woman in the UK to win a Nobel prize for science; generations of distinguished novelists; the first woman to be an ordained minister; three of the twentieth century's leading philosophers; the first doctor to enter Belsen concentration camp at the end of the Second World War; the first Ghanaian man to be President of the Oxford Union; winners of innumerable prizes for academic distinctions, and the list goes on. 

Read about some of these extraordinary Somervillians:

Vera Brittain: Voice of the "lost" generation of WW1

Indira Gandhi: India's first woman Prime Minister

Sam Gyimah: Member of Parliament for East Surrey

Dorothy Hodgkin: The UK's only female Nobel Prize winner for science

Raja Zarith Sofiah Idris: The ‘Intellectual Princess’

Samantha Knights: Barrister and adviser to the European Human Rights Advocacy Centre

Iris Murdoch: One of the most important British writers of the twentieth century

Dorothy L Sayers: The creator of Lord Peter Wimsey

Margaret Thatcher: Britain's first woman Prime Minister

Anne Warburton: Britain's first woman ambassador

Mary Ward: Social reformer and Somerville founder

Shirley Williams: Prominent UK Politician and co-founder of the Social Democrat Party