Dorothy was eighteen when she arrived at Oxford University in 1928. Her parents were living abroad, as they often were. Her three younger sisters were in England, as they usually were. The letters to write, the logistics of a separated family, much of it fell to Dorothy, as the eldest, at least on the children’s side. It would even be common in the college years ahead for Dorothy’s younger sisters to come stay with her during term. So by the time she arrived at Oxford, she was already accustomed to handling important responsibilities and to doing more than was typically asked of someone her age. And she did so without remark.

Which may be why, at least in part, what greeted her there didn’t slow or stop her.

Despite Oxford’s eight-hundred-year history, women had been offered admission for just about fifty years and had been granted degrees only since 1920. With their presence still quite new, remnants of the past existed everywhere. Some professors still addressed everyone in their classrooms as “gentlemen,” regardless of who was sitting there. Others went further and removed women from lectures altogether, on the grounds that they distracted the men. The university set quotas for women’s colleges, but not for men’s. And most women chose not to study chemistry, Dorothy’s area of interest.

Amidst this environment, Dorothy found her footing in the way she tended to do everything — she was precise, a little solitary, and prone to working after everyone else had gone home, and often during vacations, for which she would occasionally be scolded. As a result, classmates found her to be a diligent student and absorbed in her work. At times, to a striking degree. One birthday year passed almost unnoticed by Dorothy. She had only just seen her sisters through an illness, back to school, and back to college herself before the day came. “My birthday passed very quietly,” she wrote, “practically all day in the labs, but it was my first day to myself for so long I wanted nothing more.”

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