The Edwardian Lady - The Story of Edith Holden

A biography of the poet and illustrator, Edith Holden, containing many reproductions of her artwork and other pertinent documents of her life. In 1906 Edith Holden wrote her Native Notes which, when published in 1977 as The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady captured the imagination of readers all over the world. In this biography Ina Taylor has brought together a unique collection of photos, paintings and mementoes of the Holden family which tell the story of Edith's life, and the background against which she developed her talents. Brought up in the last years of the Victorian age in the new and exciting industrial centre of Birmingham, the Holden family participated to the full in the expanding artistic and cultural life of the city, where William Morris and Walter Crane were contemporaries. Edith then went to Scotland, where she studied under the painter Joseph Denovan Adam, to Dartmoor, where she came closest to the wild life and natural surrounds that later played such an importany part in her life and work, and finally to London, where she carried on her painting and illustrating in Chelsea after her marriage to the sculptor Ernest Smith, and where she lived until her tragic death by drowning in 1920...