As a pioneering Victorian feminist scholar, Charlotte must have seemed old-fashioned to the women of her daughter's generation, particularly after Henry's death, when her incisive persona as the uncompromising author of British Freewomen gave way to the dowdy mantle of elderly bluestocking widow. In her early sixties Charlotte had become an eccentric figure, dressed in an old-fashioned bonnet above a long black gown. The taut wit and triumphant logic that characterized her earlier speeches and writings would gradually give way to loquaciousness and convolution. To Marie, absorbed in the new opportunities available to her sex – university study and travel abroad – her anxious mother was more of a nuisance than a help. Winnie remained at home with her mother but had hopes of gaining some independence by learning bookbinding.

For Charlotte, the first decade of the twentieth century was a time of loss and upheaval mixed with new ambitions and friendships. The greatest change for Charlotte, and her heaviest loss, came when Henry died on 5 December 1902 at a cottage in Greenhithe, near Swanscombe. In 1900 he had located a new gravel pit in Kent, Dierden's Pit in Greenshithe, which he reported to the Anthropological Society as a site of ‘prime importance for its rich fossiliferous, and particularly molluscan, content including several extinct species’. With the promise of support from a benefactor to further his work, he had rented rooms in Greenhithe, but the delay in securing the property combined with his illness ultimately prevented him from completing the work. Intermittently unwell for much of the previous decade, Henry had kept up his usual punishing schedule of activities. In June 1902, seriously ill, he went to Hungary with a delegation of Essex farmers. If this was intended as a health cure, the trip was unsuccessful. He returned to England weak and suffering his final decline.

Charlotte had not revealed to Winnie and Marie the seriousness of his situation until 1902, but her letter written to them both from Denning Road on New Year's Eve 1899 reveals a protective warmth towards her daughters and a tenderness for Henry that she rarely expressed.