E-Books →Separate Lives Uncovering the Hidden Family of Victorian Professor Mary Rippon

In January 1878, after several years of education in Germany, France, and Switzerland, the soft-spoken twenty-seven-year-old was welcomed at the newly opened University of Colorado in the then-small frontier town of Boulder. The growth of her lengthy career paralleled the early growth of the university, where she worked her way up from first female faculty member to the university's first female professor, eventually chairing the Department of German Language and Literature.
The truth of Mary's separate lives was not disclosed until nearly a century later, in 1976, when her elderly grandson revealed to a university librarian that he was Mary's descendant. In 2006, Mary received a posthumous honorary degree from the University of Colorado, and in 2020 a scholarship was endowed in her name. Silvia Pettem's carefully researched biography weaves together the story of Mary's private life with her professional career-not to tarnish Mary's well-deserved reputation, but rather to uncover the human side of a woman whose circumstances clashed with the mores of her times.