This collection features the autobiographical memoir of Elizabeth Thomson (1847–1914), a teacher, missionary, traveller, and suffragette. It follows her life from her early years in Glasgow and London through her international travels and missionary work, and her active involvement in the women’s suffrage movement in Scotland. The memoir offers a vivid firsthand account of campaigning during this time. 

Find out more about Elizabeth Thomson and Scottish suffrage.

Elizabeth Thomson’s Autobiography: In Context

Hannah Speed, PhD Student

The Life Story of Elizabeth Thomson, 1847-1918 reveals the remarkable journey of Thomson's teaching, missionary work, travel, social reform and campaigning for women’s suffrage. In the only known surviving copy of her unpublished autobiography, Thomson describes her years spent on overseas missions, involvement in social causes and her role in the struggle for women’s rights...
 
This collection was digitised in 2024 by the University of Glasgow Library's Photographic Unit to improve access to the material and support the long-term preservation of the original records. As part of preparation for the Digital Research Collections platform, metadata was reviewed and enhanced to improve discovery. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) was applied to the digitised images to support full-text searching. As with all OCR-generated text, search results may contain errors or omissions, particularly where original print quality, page layout, or document condition affects the accuracy of text recognition.