Background
Knight was born in Swiss Cottage, London and attended Fremarch School, Hampstead.
Knight was born in Swiss Cottage, London and attended Fremarch School, Hampstead.
She obtained her Doctor of Philosophy in 1935.
She was one of few women active in the early days of analytic aesthetics. She began her Bachelor at Bedford College, London, before coming to Cambridge University in 1921 where she took Participant II Moral Sciences in 1923 and obtained a first class degree. From 1923 to 1925 she was a Research Student at Newnham College.
During the war she was Principal at the Board of Trade, a position that had been temporarily filled by fellow philosopher Margaret MacDonald.
She also taught English at an independent girls boarding school, North Foreland Lodge in Kent from 1942 to 1949. Knight was one of a select group to whom Ludwig Wittgenstein dictated his Blue and Brown Books in the 1930s, which outline the transition in Wittgenstein"s thought between his two major works, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations.
Between 1935 and 1941 she was a researcher in Aesthetics at Cambridge. During this time she contributed to or published occasional papers on aesthetics for different philosophical journals (Mind, Philosophy and others).
In 1945 she addressed the Aristotelian Society talking about the Women's Graduate Club in Cambridge.
“Judging by the calibre of co-presenters, discussants and commentators of her papers, her work was admired and taken seriously.”. In 1949 Knight emigrated to Australia where she was a tutor in English Literature at Janet Clarke Hall, University of Melbourne until the 1960s. She died in Melbourne, Australia aged 84.
Knight became a member of the Aristotelian Society in 1922, acting in its Executive Committee for several terms.