Isabel Fry

Isabel Fry (25 March 1869– 26 March 1958) was an English educator and social activist.

She was one of twins, with her sister Agnes Fry, born to the barrister and judge Sir Edward Fry and his wife Mariabella Hodgkin. They were younger sisters of Roger Fry, the art critic, who used to call them "the twinges". Her background, which was Quaker, was mentioned in her obituary in The Times, her 60 first cousins being a cross-section of those prominent in British intellectual life. Her other prominent siblings were Joan Mary Fry, Margery Fry, and Ruth Fry.

Fry had a governess, disliking the object lesson style of instruction, and attended Highfield, a boarding school at Liphook in Hampshire, for a year at age 16. With no further formal instruction, she travelled with the family, and did some teaching of "factory girls". She wrote a note in Nature in 1887, from Highgate, about a meteor. In 1896 she was part of the British Astronomical Association expedition to Norway to observe the total solar eclipse of August 9. She subsequently joined the association on 25 November 1896 at the proposal of Andrew Crommelin.

The well-connected Frys were also an "enclave". Isabel asked her mother if she could study at the University of Cambridge. In answer, there was "[...] she might then have the misfortune to marry one of Roger's friends, and, as it was, her father's dinner-time conversation supplied her with ample education [...]". None of the six daughters, referred to by Quaker relations as "those poor Fry girls", ever married.

Constance Crommelin, sister of the astronomer Andrew Crommelin, visited the family house at Failand in Somerset. Then at her invitation, Fry taught in 1891–2 at the Brighton Wimbledon House school (the future Roedean School), attended by her younger sister Margery Fry. She made a break from her family at this point.

Around 1895 Fry moved to London with Constance Crommelin. She worked as a governess, if not conventionally, having Margaret Lois Garrett and Dorothy Garrod as pupils. She taught small groups of children in homes. She began teaching in London private schools, one of which was at the Harley Street home of Walter Jessop. She taught at Allenswood School run by Marie Souvestre; and then founded her own school in Marylebone Road.

In 1908 Fry encountered Halide Edib and visited Turkey. Edib wrote a letter to The Nation, and Fry replied. Salih Zeki, at that time Edib's husband, called on Fry in London. There resulted a visit in which Fry travelled to Turkey in February 1909, for a stay of three weeks. She met female reformers, and visited schools. She persuaded the Balkan Committee, formed as a result of the 1902–4 phase of the Macedonian Struggle, for whom her father was active, to fund in 1910 bursaries for education of Turkish girls.

In 1909 Fry took Rectory Farm, a house in Great Hampden, Buckinghamshire, jointly with Constance who had married John Masefield in 1903. Masefield's novel Multitude and Solitude of 1909 contains characters Ottalie Fawcett, based on Constance, and her friend Agatha who is "an independent-minded, jealous-temperamented woman", based on Isabel, drawn rather closely from life. Ulick O'Connor, claiming that Isabel had demanded most of Constance's time after the marriage, called her a "sinister spinster".