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Edith Tudor Hart: A Life Reframed
To mark the recent publication of her new biography of Edith Tudor Hart A Woman Named Edith – the first in English – Daria Santini will illuminate the creative and investigative process behind the book. A gifted Austrian photographer from a prominent Jewish family at the heart of social-democratic Vienna between the wars, the communist Tudor Hart – born Edith Suschitzky in 1908 – married an Englishman, moved to London in the early 1930s and, while continuing to turn her camera on scenes of social injustice and championing progressive causes, embarked on a clandestine career in the service of the Soviet Union, for which she delivered some of Stalin’s most valuable British recruits.
Opening with an account of her research and the gradual unearthing of successive layers of her subject’s life and personality, Santini’s talk will focus on Tudor Hart’s wide circle of friends and acquaintances in Britain. Bringing fresh understanding to the perennial question of her devotion to the Soviet cause – and eschewing sensationalism throughout – the author places Tudor Hart firmly within the cultural and political world she inhabited.
Seen from this perspective, Edith Tudor Hart emerges not only as one of the most significant photographers of her generation, but as a profoundly connected figure: a woman fully, and not least tragically, of her time whose continuing relevance, both as an artist and as an activist, remains beyond question.
Daria Santini is a biographer and cultural historian. Born in Rome and educated both in Italy and Germany, she eventually made her home in England, where she went on to pursue an academic career in German language and literature. She now writes full-time and lives between London and Italy. Her latest book A Woman Named Edith. Émigré, Photographer, Secret Agent – The Extraordinary Life of Edith Tudor Hart, follows The Exiles: Actors, Artists and Writers Who Fled the Nazis for London (Bloomsbury, 2019), a group portrait of some of the key figures in the German-speaking émigré community in 1930s London.