Fredegond Cecily Maitland was the daughter of a legal historian, Frederic William Maitland, and his wife Florence Henrietta Fisher. Her mother was a maternal first cousin to Virginia Woolf and sister of Adeline Maria Fisher, the wife of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Her mother's second marriage to Francis Darwin in 1913 brought her in contact with his extended family. She attended Newnham College in 1910–1913 and during that period also spent time in London with the Vaughan Williams. In 1915 she married the economist Gerald Shove, who like her own family, had links with the Bloomsbury group. As a conscientious objector doing farming as his alternative service, he worked at Garsington Manor near Oxford for most of 1916-1917. The future Juliette Huxley, who was working there as a French tutor, later reminisced: "In those days... I saw a good deal of Fredegond Shove, Gerald's wife, who lived like a Spartan at the Bailiff's Cottage." Their employer, Lady Ottoline Morrell, also remembered Fredegond then as "an enchanting creature, very sensitive, delicate and highly strung, with a fantastic imagination".