Virginia Surtees

Virginia Surtees (née Bell, formerly Virginia, Lady Clarke and Virginia Craig) (9 January 1917 – 22 September 2017) was a British art historian and author. Early life She was the second daughter of American diplomat Edward Bell (1882–1924) and his second wife, English heiress Etelka Bertha (née Surtees) Bell, whom Virginia did not like. Her elder sister, Evangeline, later married the American diplomat David K. E. Bruce. Her father, who was involved in the reception in 1917 of the Zimmermann telegram, died in Peking while serving as the acting British Minister to China (when Minister Jacob Gould Schurman was back in Washington) in 1924. After the death of her father in 1924, her mother remarried to Sir James Leishman Dodds, a British career diplomat who served as the British Minister to Bolivia, Cuba and the Ambassador to Peru. From her mother's second marriage, she had a younger half-sister, Josephine Leishman Dodds, who married Squadron Leader Hugh Glyn Laurence Arthur Brooking, the King's Messenger, in 1949. Her maternal grandparents were Brig. Gen. Sir Herbert Conyers Surtees and the former Madeleine Augusta Crabbe (a daughter of Edward Crabbe and Ruth Herbert, artist's model to the English poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, of whom Virginia later wrote a catalogue of his drawings and watercolours). Her aunt Dorothy was married to Sir Patrick Ramsay, the second son of John Ramsay, 13th Earl of Dalhousie and a brother-in-law of Princess Patricia of Connaught (through her husband Sir Alexander Ramsay), a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. On her father's side, she was a grand-niece of the publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr. When Virginia was young, the family lived in Beijing, and then according to her step-father's international movements.