Maude Stanley

The Hon. Maude Alethea Stanley (May 1833 –14 July 1915) was a British youth work pioneer and women's welfare activist.

Stanley was born at Alderley Park, Chelford in Cheshire, the third daughter and fourth of ten children of the politician Edward Stanley and the women's education campaigner Henrietta Stanley (later Baron and Baroness Stanley of Alderley). In 1834, her paternal grandfather, John Stanley, 1st Baron Stanley of Alderley, wrote a manuscript on philosophy dedicated to his newborn granddaughter and called "Alethea's Book".

Stanley shared her family's tolerant and liberal views towards religion – her parents were Anglicans, her eldest brother Henry a convert to Islam, her youngest brother Algernon a Roman Catholic bishop and her youngest sister Rosalind an agnostic. Stanley herself has been described as low church. Her youngest sisters, Katharine Russell, Viscountess Amberley, and Rosalind Howard, Countess of Carlisle, both campaigned for women's suffrage. It was decided that Stanley should remain unmarried, and Lady Amberley assured her sister that their parents and siblings needed her at home. Described by Lady Amberley's son Bertrand Russell as "stern and gloomy Aunt Maude", Stanley doted on her siblings' numerous children. Russell himself thought of her as the perfect aunt and an embodiment of kindness. In his later years, he recalled: "I used to enjoy going to see her when I was a child because she had a parrot that talked, and because she sometimes gave me marrons glacés." In 1894, Stanley took her nephew to visit Monsignor Algernon in Rome.

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