At just 25, Florence Murray has been through more challenges and trials than most people experience in a lifetime. After being thrown from a horse in her early teens, she has survived three surgeries, been married, widowed and now journeyed from Australia to England to start a new life. She is not an independent woman but is completely dependent on her parents for a roof over her head. She also needs her mother’s help on days when the pain makes it hard to dress or traverse the stairs.
What does Florence want? More than anything in the world, she wants to be an architect. To follow in her father’s footsteps and design houses, mansions, castles or cottages—anything would be enough. But the world in the year of 1877 is not kind to women like her, and she is not afforded the opportunity of formal training or professional acknowledgement.
And beneath that dream is a very simple yearning—she would like to be independent.
Age: 25
Family: Widow. Only child of Harold and Connie Holt.
Work: Paints her father’s architecture plans
Notes: Lives with shoulder pain from after being bucked from a horse as a child.