author

Agnes Ethel Conway

1885–1950

Drawn to archaeology as a student and later known for pioneering fieldwork in the Middle East, this British historian and archaeologist combined sharp scholarship with a taste for travel and discovery. Her journeys through the Balkans and her work at Petra helped preserve a vivid record of places in change.

1 Audiobook

The Book of Art for Young People

The Book of Art for Young People

by Agnes Ethel Conway, Sir William Martin Conway

About the author

Educated at Newnham College, Cambridge, Agnes Ethel Conway grew up in an intellectual family and studied history at a time when women at Cambridge still faced major barriers to full academic recognition. Early on, she was influenced by classical studies and archaeology, and she went on to study at the British School at Rome and the British School at Athens.

Before her best-known archaeological work, she made an ambitious journey through the Balkans in 1914 with her friend Evelyn Radford. That trip became the basis of A Ride Through the Balkans: On Classic Ground with a Camera (1917), a travel book shaped by both archaeology and close observation of the people and upheavals she encountered on the eve of the First World War.

In 1929, she took part in the first scientific excavation at Petra alongside George Horsfield, whom she later married in Jerusalem in January 1932. The couple lived in Transjordan for a time and continued their research and travel in the region before eventually settling back in England. Agnes Conway Horsfield died in 1950.