Henrietta Emma "Etty" Darwin, (25 September 1843 - 17 December 1929) was a daughter of Charles Darwin and his wife Emma Wedgwood.
Etty was born in Down House, Downe in 1843. She was Darwin's third daughter and the eldest daughter to reach adulthood after the eldest Annie died aged 10, and second daughter Mary died before becoming a month old. She and her brother Frank helped their father with his work, and Etty helped edit The Descent of Man.
In August 1871 she married Richard Buckley Litchfield who was born in Downe, 1832, but the couple never had any children. She was widowed on 11 January 1903 when he died in Cannes, France.
It was Etty who had several passages from Charles Darwin's biography of his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, The Life of Erasmus Darwin, removed and probably had a similar hand in editing to similar effect The Autobiography of Charles Darwin. She also edited her mother's private papers Emma Darwin: wife of Charles Darwin. A Century of Family Letters (1904). She also responded to the Lady Hope Story that her father had undergone a deathbed conversion by writing an article in The Christian in 1922 saying it " no foundation whatever". She died in Burrows Hill, Gomshall, Surrey, aged 86.
Famous quotes containing the word darwin:
“Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.”
—Richard Dawkins (b. 1941)