 She was made a Fellow of the Linnean Society, among the first women admitted to full membership.Dora Pertz was born in London on 14 March 1859 to Georg Heinrich Pertz and his second wife, Leonora Horner, daughter of Leonard Horner, who was a progressive intellectual and an adamant supporter of Darwinism, a fact he noted in his final address.She grew up in a family where women were well-educated and intellectually active; one of her aunts was the botanist Katharine Murray Lyell, who was a biographer of Charles Lyell, her brother-in-law.