‘The owl of Minerva spreads is wings only with the falling of dusk” and she explains that ‘the thought for which I want to use it is that wisdom, and therefore philosophy, comes into its own when things become dark and difficult rather than when they are clear and straightforward.  That – it seems to me – is why it is so important.’ She believed that philosophy was a necessity rather than a luxury, as it has to be used when things are difficult.  

Her obituaries describe her as a philosopher with a sharp critical intelligence who believed that philosophy matters. She was part of a ‘strikingly able and forceful group of women philosophers at Oxford’; Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch and Philippa Foot.  She went from Downe House to Somerville, gained a first and after a time working as a civil servant and for four terms after that, she taught Classics back here at Downe House and then at Bedford School.  She was in London on VE day, she danced on the streets and cheered: ‘Being in a large crowd that is genuinely joyful and unanimous is a wonderful thing’ she wrote in her memoir. After the war ended, she returned to Oxford, began postgraduate studies and went on to tutor at Somerville and then lecture at the University of Reading.  She took what might now be called a career break, marrying a fellow philosopher, Geoffrey Midgley, and they began a family, having moved to Newcastle.  

She turned to journalism, as a reviewer, and then to academia again, lecturing at the University of Newcastle. Her first book was published in 1978, when she was 56 and went on to write many many more.  

She came to Downe House at the age of 12 and says she immediately enjoyed a new sense of space – she loved the views, the walks in the woodland and the surrounding countryside and the variety among her fellow pupils and the staff at school.  Of the freedom to walk with friends in free time she wrote that they once walked ‘across the landscape to the far horizon, about which we had always wondered, and saw the still further horizon that stretched beyond it.’   

The way the school had been developed suited Mary, not overtly progressive, but a school where leisure time was seen as important and not every moment of the day filled with compulsory activity. She writes in her memoirs of standing in the cloisters with friends, despondent and wondering what to do on a cold wet weekend afternoon, when Miss Willis put her head out of her study window and invited them up to her study, and to their delight, read them Browning.  Mary also enjoyed many of talks and entertainments given by visitors:  they enjoyed listed to the writer Charles Williams, ‘I can still hear his deep, rather grinding, cockney voice reciting Donne and taking us through King Lear, bring out strange and exciting angles.’  

She was interested in the senses, and describes how she often looked at the stars at night when standing looking upwards in the centre of the cloisters; ‘a tremendous light-show, twinkling and various, unimaginably far away yet reliably always there ….  the realisation that one was only a tiny part of a vast and beautiful universe – was immensely welcome and reassuring.’  

She enjoyed the humanities subject here but described Geography as ‘a vacuum, of which I remember only the oxbow lake’. She became excited about science but found that what seemed to matter, when it came down to it, was the writing up of diagrams and descriptions of experiments in the passive voice – she struggled with the ‘ink well’ -  but she took to Classics.  She decided to read that rather than English at university on the advice of her English teacher who her pointed out that ‘English literature is something that you read in any case, so it is better to study something that you otherwise wouldn’t’.  On another wet weekend afternoon, she took two Everyman volumes of Plato’s dialogues from the library shelf and was quickly ‘hooked’. When she began at Oxford though, she was struck that although she was less well prepared than many other students, the flexible and wider education that she had at Downe house had given her a distinct advantage.  She was wildly interested in Classics and found that some of the more prepared students had got to a point where they were bored by it and had been directed to its study simply because they were clever. 

Mary enjoyed her History lessons at Downe House too.  ‘Our History teachers constantly brought together the many different aspects of life that history tells of, and they also connected the past with what was happening in our own day.’  Fortnightly talks about current events helped the girls to reach back into the past to show how current events became possible and what states of mind had shaped the world.  ‘This way of getting at the meaning of the present by looking at the past has remained central to me.  It is just as useful for understanding thought as it is for understanding action.’ 

She says she was criticised for being untidy and reluctantly observed that the pastoral care and strategy to improve this was to appoint a girl as form captain, which worked.  She enjoyed participating in the drama productions and the archive photo shows her, on the left, as the Elder Brother in Comus in 1935.    With some friends she developed something they called Sunday Night Occupation when they would gather and improvise a long running and ‘most satisfactory soap opera’ which she comments wryly ‘greatly improved our approach to Monday mornings’.   

Although she sometimes regretted the sense of social isolation, she enjoyed her time here at Downe; ‘I made some very good friends who have remained among those closest to me for the rest of my life’. 

Sources:  The Owl of Minerva, A Memoir by Mary Midgley, published by Routledge in 2005, and obituaries from The Times, The Independent, the Guardian and the FT.  and the Guardian.