Elsie Butler matriculated at Newnham in 1908 to read modern languages. She learned Russian when WWI broke out and went to work in field hospitals in Russia and Macedonia as an interpreter and administrator. She was appointed lecturer in German at Newnham in 1920, but would have preferred to work on French or Russian. Encouraged to write about German literature and the German national character, she was very pleased when one of her books was banned by the Nazis. Butler became professor of German in Manchester in 1936 and returned to Cambridge as Schroeder professor of German in 1944, the first and only woman to hold the chair. Her older sister, Kathleen, was Mistress of Girton. Her partner from 1926, Isaline Blew Horner, had also been an undergraduate at Newnham and stayed on as librarian. In Elsie’s autobiography Paper Boats (written just before she died), she inserts Isaline subtly into the narrative ‘she slipped into this chronicle a few pages back and from now onwards she will never be absent from it for long for we have stuck together like glue ever since’.
