Grave in the Friary Churchyard of St Francis and St Anthony, Crawley, 2017
Born
Una Constance Birch
(1875-04-21)21 April 1875
Died
16 August 1949(1949-08-16) (aged 74)
Nationality
British
Occupation(s)
Writer, historian, biographer
Dame Una Constance Pope-Hennessy, DBE (née Birch; 21 April 1875 – 16 August 1949) was a British writer, historian, and biographer. She was the daughter of
Sir Arthur Birch, and married Major (later Major-General)
Richard Pope-Hennessy in 1910.
Pope-Hennessy's early published works were historical studies of jades and
secret societies. Her first biographies were on
Anna Van Schurman and
Madame Roland. In 1929 she published Three English Women in America, charting American experience of
Frances Trollope,
Fanny Kemble and
Harriet Martineau. It became one of her best known works, and so did her biographical study of
Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1934. Other widely read biographies followed. In 1940 she published a biography of
Agnes Strickland, and the exhaustive biography of
Charles Dickens was published in 1945.[2]
In 1938 Pope-Hennessy published an account of her visit to
Leningrad during the
Stalin reign in The Closed City. Her final two books were translations, A Czarina's Story and Canon Charles Kingsley both published in 1948 a year before her death.[3]
Selected bibliography
Pope-Hennessy's books, usually published as Una Birch, included:
Maxims of a Queen (1907; writings of Queen
Christina of Sweden, selected and translated by Birch)
Secret Societies and the
French Revolution (1911; still in print as James Wassermann (ed.): Secret Societies: Illuminati, Freemasons and the French Revolution. Nicolas Hayes, 2007,
ISBN978-0892541324)