Una Pope-Hennessy
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Dame Una Constance Pope-Hennessy DBE (1876–17 August 1949), née Una Constance Birch, was a British writer, mainly on history and biography.
She was the daughter of Sir Arthur Birch and married Major (later Major-General) Richard Pope-Hennessy in 1910.
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), Anna van Schurman: Artist, Scholar, Saint (1909), Secret Societies and the French Revolution (1911; still in print as Secret Societies: Illuminati, Freemasons and the French Revolution[1]), Madame Roland: A Study in Revolution (1917), Early Chinese Jades (1923; about Chinese jade figurines, which she collected), Three English Women in America (1929; about Fanny Trollope, Fanny Kemble and Harriet Martineau), The Aristocratic Journey (1931; the edited letters of Margaret Hall in the United States, 1827–1828), The Laird of Abbotsford: An Informal Presentation of Sir Walter Scott (1932), Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849: A Critical Biography (1934), The Closed City: Impressions of a Visit to Leningrad (1938; she had visited in 1937), Agnes Strickland: Biographer of the Queens of England (1940), Durham Company (1941; about the literary associations of County Durham), Charles Dickens (1945), A Jade Miscellany (1946), Sir Walter Scott (1948), A Czarina's Story (1948; by Tsarina Alexandra of Russia; translated and edited by Pope-Hennessy), and Canon Charles Kingsley (1948).
During the First World War, she was a member of the Central Prisoners of War Committee of the British Red Cross Society. For this work, she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 1920 civilian war honours.
Her two sons were both notable in their own right: James Pope-Hennessy was a writer and Sir John Pope-Hennessy an art historian.
