Elizabeth Senior

Elizabeth Senior (1910-1941) was an art historian and Assistant Keeper in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum . She was also a book editor for Penguin Books.
Biography.
Elizabeth Senior was born in 1910 in the village of Dore in Derbyshire (the village is now in South Yorkshire) to parents Oliver and Sally Senior. Her brother, Derek Senior, was born two years later.
Elizabeth Senior was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge; Munich and the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Her main field of study was in medieval art.
In 1941 Senior gave birth to a daughter, Sally Maud Senior. The birth was registered in the first quarter of that year. Senior's early death in 1941 during The Blitz came around ten weeks after Sally Maud was born. Sally Maud was found alive under a table amongst the wreckage of their home.
Working Life.
In 1934 Senior entered employment at the British Museum. She became a friend to a number of eminent Jewish emigre art historians including Ernst Gombrich and, as the threat of war grew closer, Senior became involved in helping to secure safe passage for those fleeing Nazi Germany.
Senior's professional relationship with Gombrich, Ernst Kris and Ernst Kitzinger was further cemented when, on secondment from the British Museum, she was an editor of the King Penguin series of books from 1939 to 1941. She also co-authored with Kitzinger the book 'Portraits of Christ' from the same series.
Legacy.
Photographs attributed to Senior appear in the Conway Library at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
A number of tributes have been made to Senior. Ernst Gombrich, in the preface to his famous work The Story of Art, makes this comment:
"This book would never have been written without the warm-hearted encouragement it received from Elizabeth Senior whose untimely death in an air raid on London was such a loss to all who knew her."
In similar vein, T.D. Kendrick, who was to become Director of the British Museum in 1950, included this comment in the preface to his book Late Saxon and Viking Art,
"...I acknowledge an irredeemable debt to my colleague Elizabeth Senior, who was killed in 1941, for she gave me invaluable assistance with her camera and her sketch-book, and I know well that her sensible suggestions and courageous opinions have brightened and improved almost every chapter I have written. "Flet tamen admonitu motus, Elissa, tui"." The Latin phrase suggesting a more personal memory of her.
The more recent article by Helen Southworth (see reference below) sets out to "to piece together the life story of a remarkable young woman..."