Sanskrit and Pali scholar, and one of the first women to be employed by Cambridge University Library. In 1883, Ridding won a higher local scholarship to Girton College, Cambridge. She took Part I of the Classical Tripos in 1886, and took her MA in 1923 after Cambridge University allowed women to receive titular degrees. At Cambridge, she met Edward Byles Cowell, the professor of Sanskrit. This was the beginning of a friendship that lasted nineteen years until his death in 1903, after which Ridding arranged the gift of his books to Girton College and the University Library. She catalogued Cowell's books at the University Library, produced handlists of the Sanskrit manuscripts and Tibetan block-books, and began a catalogue of the Sanskrit manuscripts (later completed by Professor Louis de La Vallée Poussin). Her work as a cataloguer was an important contribution to scholarship; she was one of only a few experts who could work across this range of material. In 1911 her nomination for the post of Curator in Oriental Literature at the University Library, was narrowly outvoted by six votes to five, and the post was left vacant. She donated books to the University Library and her own collection of South Asian books and first editions of the novelist Charlotte Yonge were bequeathed to Girton College. The College's annual prize for reading aloud was founded in her memory.