Mary Anderson (art historian)
British art historian
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mary Désirée Anderson (1902–1973) was a British specialist in Christian iconography and early Church drama, as well as a leading expert on English medieval woodcarving. She was a poet in her own right.[1] Photographs contributed by Maisie Anderson to the Conway Library are currently being digitised by the Courtauld Institute of Art, as part of the Courtauld Connects project.[2] She published under the name M. D. Anderson.[3]
Personal life
Anderson married Sir George Trenchard Cox (1905–1995) in 1935, a fellow art historian, and museum director (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and the V&A).[4] Her parents were British physiologist and academic Hugh Kerr Anderson (1865–1928)[5][6] and Jessie Mina Innes (d. 1946). Anderson died in 1973.[7]
Archive
Her memoirs, diaries (1918–1933), sketchbook, letters, poems and pamphlets, are held at Gonville and Caius College Archive, Cambridge, having been donated by her husband, Sir George Trenchard Cox.[8][9] Her reminiscences of life at Cambridge feature in A History of the University of Cambridge: Volume 4 (1870–1990), edited by Christopher Brooke, Christopher N. L. Brooke, Damian Riehl Leader, Victor Morgan, and Peter Searb.[7]
Selected works
Academic writing
- The Medieval Carver,1935, Cambridge U. P.
- Animal Carvings in British Churches, 1938, Cambridge U. P.
- Design for a journey, 1940, Cambridge U. P.
- British Women at War, 1941, John Murray; Pilot Press
- Looking for history in British Churches, 1951, John Murray
- Choir Stalls of Lincoln Minster, 1951, Friends of Lincoln Cathedral
- Misericords. Medieval life in English woodcarving. 1954, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books
- The Imagery of British Churches, 1955, John Murray
- Drama and Imagery in English Medieval Churches, 1963, Cambridge U.P.
- Grey Sisters, 1972, Chatto and Windus
- A saint at stake: the strange death of William of Norwich 1144, 1964, Faber
- History by the Highway, 1967, Faber & Faber, 1967
- The Changeling Niobid, 1969, Chatto & Windus
- History and imagery in British churches, 1971, J. Murray
Poetry
- Bow Bells are Silent [poems], 1943, Williams & Norgate
- Her poem 'The Black-Out' published in Peace and War: A Collection of Poems, edited by Michael Harrison, Christopher Stuart-Clark (1989), p. 97
- Her poem 'The Time of Dunkirk' in Shadows of War, British Women's Poetry of the Second World War, ed. Anne Powell (Sutton Publishing, 1999), p. 41