The life of Victoria, Lady Welby presents several anomalies: a woman with no formal education, her social position, incisive mind, and industrious correspondence enabled her to engage in probing discussion with the most important minds of the English-speaking world at the turn of the century. Her position in the Victorian English aristocracy notwithstanding, her reformist ideas on religion and language and her philosophy of interpretation place her firmly among the early twentieth century's most progressive and original thinkers. Largely unknown now except to specialists in Victorian life and letters, semioticians, and scholars of C. S. Peirce (with whom she corresponded during the last decade of her life), Welby's work on meaning was influential in its time and still merits study and development.