page_title: Audrey Withers
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Audrey Withers / Early life
context_page_description: Elizabeth Audrey Withers OBE, known as Audrey Withers, was an English journalist, also active as a member of the Council of Industrial Design. She edited the British magazine Vogue between 1940 and 1960 and was the author of The Palaces of Leningrad and an autobiography.
  While she used her own name professionally, in some other contexts she was known by her married names, Mrs A. H. Stewart from 1933 to 1952 and Mrs Victor Kennett from 1953 until her death.
context_section_description: Withers was born at Hale in Lancashire (a parish later transferred to Cheshire), the daughter of Dr Percy Withers (1867–1945), a physician and author, by his marriage to Mary Wolley Summers (1870–1947). Her mother, who had lost both parents at an early age, belonged to a family which owned John Summers & Sons, a company operating a steelworks on the Wirral, and was herself a graduate of Somerville College, Oxford. The family soon moved to the Lake District, where Withers grew up with an older sister and a younger brother on the shores of Derwent Water. The girls were first educated at home by a governess. Their father had literary friends, including the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges, and the artist Paul Nash.
  Withers went as a boarder to St Leonards School, St Andrews, then to Somerville, her mother's old college, graduating from Oxford in 1927 with a Second in philosophy, politics, and economics.
caption: Derwent Water
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