Eugénie Sellers Strong: Portrait of an Archaeologist

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Duckworth, 2004 - Biography & Autobiography - 244 pages
Eugenie Sellers Strong lived through a fascinating, tumultuous, and ultimately tragic period of European history. Born in the Golden Age of Queen Victoria, she died at the moment when the titanic struggle of World War II was reaching its height, with some of the most dramatic scenes taking place outside her Roman front door. Eugenie Sellers Strong was a pioneer: she was among the first women in England to receive a university education and, after leaving Cambridge, went on to become a professional archaeologist. She was made Assistant Director of the British School at Rome, where, some say, her ghost haunts the library still.
From the Pre-Raphaelite drawing rooms of 1880s London to the salons of Mussolini’s Italy, Eugenie Sellers Strong was an active presence on the European cultural scene. She enjoyed close friendships with some of the most important writers, artists and intellectuals of her day, among them, Edward Burne-Jones, Edmund Gosse, Gertrude Bell, Frederick Leighton, Lady Ottoline Morrell and Jane Harrison. In recent years, Eugenie Sellers Strong has been attacked as a Mussolini sympathiser and overlooked by recent biographers in favour of her more famous friends: her story has been in urgent need of retelling. Stephen L. Dyson provides a lively and engaging account of the life of the woman Gladstone once described as his ‘first and only love’.

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Contents

Crisis at the British School
147
The Golden Years of a Scholar
161
A Life and Death in Fascist Rome
179
Copyright

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About the author (2004)

Stephen L. Dyson is Professor of Classics at the University at Buffalo, New York. His research has centered on the archaeology of Roman Italy and the development of the Roman frontier. He is the author of The Roman Villas of Buccino (1983), The Creation of the Roman Frontier (1985), Community and Society in Roman Italy (1992), Ancient Marbles to American Shores (1998) and The Roman Countryside (2003).

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