author
1876–1962
An early 20th-century British writer, she is remembered for fiction centered on women’s lives and for illustrated travel books created with her husband, the artist Muirhead Bone. Her work ranged from short stories and novels to books shaped by years of travel in Italy and Spain.
by Gertrude Bone
Gertrude Helena Bone was a British writer born in 1876. Raised in Glasgow, she was the daughter of a Methodist minister and later married the artist Muirhead Bone in 1903. Their family life was closely connected to the arts, and their son Stephen Bone also became an artist.
She began publishing in the Edwardian period, starting with Provincial Tales in 1904. She went on to write short stories, three novels, and several illustrated books. Her best-known fiction includes Women of the Country (1913), a novel noted for its close attention to the lives and experiences of women.
In the 1920s and 1930s, she traveled widely with Muirhead Bone, especially in Italy and Spain, and those journeys helped shape later books such as Old Spain. After her husband was knighted in 1937, she became Lady Gertrude Bone. She died in 1962.