Dorothy Pilley Richards

Dorothy Pilley Richards (16 September 1894 in Camberwell, London – 24 September 1986 in Cambridge) was a prominent female mountaineer. She began climbing in Wales and joined the Fell and Rock Climbing Club. In the 1920s, she climbed extensively in the Alps, Britain, and North America after her marriage to Ivor Armstrong Richards.

In 1928, she made the celebrated first ascent of the north ridge of the Dent Blanche, with Joseph Georges, Antoine Georges and her husband, which she described in her well-regarded memoir, Climbing Days (1935).

Sources

• Dorothy Pilley (Mrs. I. A. Richards), Climbing Days (London: Bell, 1935)
• Carol A. Osborne, "Richards , Dorothy Eleanor (1894–1986)" in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 15 August 2010