Eva Anstruther

Who was Eva Anstruther?

Dame Eva Anstruther DBE was an English writer and poet.

She was born as Eva Isabella Henrietta Hanbury-Tracy, the eldest child of the 4th Lord Sudeley. She grew up in Gloucestershire at Toddington Manor, near Tewkesbury. Her two immediate siblings were boys and she grew up a somewhat lonely child, resorting to creative writing from a young age. She cultivated a wide circle of similar-minded friends and began writing seriously at age 14.

As an adult, she had some success with poems, newspaper columns, short stories, one play and several novels. She had a special "den" in her home where she would sit and read or write. Sometimes in London she would go to Clifford's Inn, where she had a small personal office. She wrote a play in 1903. She may have written another play, Old Clothes, mentioned in a collectors' item manuscript - a letter written in March 1904 by Thomas Anstey Guthrie, who is also known as F. Anstey.