Eugénie Sellers Strong (1860-1943) was a British classical archaeologist, art historian, and the first female Assistant Director of the British School at Rome (1909-1925). Fluent in Italian, German and French as well as her native tongue, Strong led a brilliantly cosmopolitan life and cultivated a high public profile as an intellectual, specialising in Greek and Roman art and sculpture. Strong led an illustrious academic career which broke new, original ground, producing the first English-language study of Roman art as a distinct subject, not derivative of its Greek equivalent as it had previously been regarded. In her scholarship, Strong considered the range and diversity of Roman accomplishment across the provinces, situating the unique and localised in the broader landscape of the Empire. She pushed boundaries in every great scholarly or professional endeavour of her life, cultivating her career in overwhelmingly male-dominated environments and several times becoming the first (often the only) woman to work or study at a given institution. With that said, Eugénie Strong resists easy feminist canonisation – not least because her pursuit of romanità led her to adopt Fascist cultural and political sympathies in later life, and her decision to stay in Rome during WWII was taken (fairly accurately) as a declaration of support for Mussolini and the Partito Nationale Fascista’s political project. Strong’s deep conservatism and her acquiescence to, if not active support of, Italian fascism in her final decade have tarnished her posthumous reputation and all but eclipsed her intellectual legacy.

Eugénie Sellers was born in London on 25 March 1860, to Anna (née Oates, of French ancestry) and Frederick, a wine merchant. She spent her early years in London and then had a convent education in Valladolid, Spain, and later, schooling with Jesuit priests in France. Despite her Catholic education, Sellers professed a sceptical indifference to religion for much of her life.

In 1879 Sellers came up to Girton College, the University of Cambridge's first women's college, to study the Classical Tripos. Given that she had been in and out of formal education and had not learned Greek or Latin prior to enrolling at Girton, Sellers's university years were by no means glittering, and she finished in the third division of her year in her final examinations (a result which was largely irrelevant anyway given that women could not graduate from Cambridge until 1948). Despite her less than impressive exam results, Sellers's tutors clearly recognised how her circumstances had impacted her academic record and were happy to attest to her potential, providing glowing references for her when in 1882 she went on to teach at St Leonards School in St Andrews. Later, Strong would claim that Cambridge left no lasting intellectual impression on her whatsoever; given that she became a Life Fellow of Girton College in 1910, the level of truth in this statement is debatable. Nonetheless, she forged some important and lifelong connections with fellow Girtonians – notably Katharine Jex-Blake, with whom she would collaborate on the first English-language translation of Pliny the Elder's 'Chapters on the History of Art' (1896).

Not content with a career in teaching, Sellers returned to London in 1883, and the next few years would prove formative to both her personal and professional trajectory. Under the tutelage of Charles Newton, she studied Greek and Roman sculpture and antiquities in the British Museum's collection; Newton encouraged her to begin giving public lectures at the British Museum, and she quickly found she was a natural public orator, soon delivering lectures to the female intellectual coteries of Bloomsbury and the University of London. During this time she also made the acquaintance of her mentor, close friend (and rumoured paramour), and fellow female classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, with whom she starred in a series of theatrical tableaux at Cromwell House; these performances were the talk of the London season of 1883. Mary Beard's 'The Invention of Jane Harrison' (2000) colourfully and enthusiastically renders this time in her life as part of a broader exploration of Sellers and Harrison's relationship.

Although Sellers enjoyed the glamour and social currency that came with moving amongst London's chattering classes, she was ultimately determined to pursue her passion for classical archaeology. With a modest publication record now beginning to stack up, from 1890-91 she became the first female student at the British School at Athens. In 1892, she moved with her friend (and again, possible lover), the artist Mary Lowndes, to what she describes as a ‘romantic if somewhat damp’ apartment in Munich, whereupon she began working closely with German archaeologists including Adolf Furtwängler, Ludwig Traube (both of whom became great mentors), Walther Amelung and Paul Arndt. At this time Eugénie assisted in the preparation of several major archaeological publications, as well as beginning to add substantially to her own publication record (probably most significantly, her publication, with Jex-Blake, of Pliny the Elder's essays was published in 1896).

Eugénie Sellers probably met her future husband, the art historian and librarian S. Arthur Strong (1863-1904), through a British Museum colleague (possibly Sidney Colvin) sometime in the early 1890s. After a long and often faltering courtship, the pair married in Kensington in 1897 – much to the dismay and apprehension of some of her friends (including Lowndes, Laurence Alma Tadema, Bernard and Mary Berenson, and Vernon Lee), who cautioned that her autonomy and academic productivity would be considerably constrained. Although her professional output did quieten during her years of marriage, her papers here and at Girton show that she continued to work productively (albeit often without authorial credit or attribution), assisting on numerous archaeological and art-historical publications and authoring the exhibition catalogue for the Burlington Fine Arts Club's 1903 Exhibition of Ancient Greek Art (again, with only minimal credit). During these years she and Arthur lived between their poky apartment on Grosvenor Road and Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, where Arthur had since 1895 been Librarian to the Duke of Devonshire. Eugénie got to know the nature and extent of her husband's work at Chatsworth intimately, so much so that when he died after a long and protracted illness in January 1904, the 8th Duke and Duchess Louise asked her to succeed him in the post – thus making her the first woman to become Librarian to the Duke of Devonshire.

Strong's time at Chatsworth was both remarkably productive and fraught with tensions and professional disagreements. On the one hand, she produced numerous important catalogues of the plays (namely the Kemble-Devonshire collection of plays), gems, Old Master drawings, works of fine art, notable Library acquisitions, and several key archival collections (notably the Hardwick Manuscripts). She also returned to classical archaeology scholarship, publishing her seminal study 'Roman Sculpture from Augustus to Constantine' in 1907. However – no doubt partly because of the gendered dynamics of her role at Chatsworth – Strong did not find it easy to integrate into the estate community, least of all with her new employers. When the 8th Duke, who had hired Strong originally, died in 1908 and was succeeded by the 9th Duke and his wife, Duchess Evelyn Cavendish, Strong quickly ran into fundamental disagreements with the new owners and their distinct approach to managing and facilitating access (or not) to their collections. As such, the relationship quickly broke down and by April 1909, Eugénie Strong and Victor Cavendish, the 9th Duke, more or less mutually agreed to end her employment there. Her time at Chatsworth opened doors for her, however, and in May 1909 she was appointed Librarian of the British School at Rome.

Strong's years in Rome were by far her most enduring in terms of her intellectual output and the social networks she forged here. Always a prolific networker, she quickly ingratiated herself into Rome's cultural and social circles – her weekly intellectual salons, held first in her apartment at the BSR and then at her apartment on via Cesare Balbo, became a focal point. She was foundational to the BSR in many ways: firstly, she built up its public profile and squeezed her sizeable address book for donations, support in-kind, and financial subsidies for the School; secondly, initially as Librarian and then as Assistant Director, she established and cultivated the BSR Library as an internationally important scholarly resource for the study of art history, architecture and archaeology, a foundation on which the BSR continues to build today; and she also brought in a diverse, global community of scholars and artists to the BSR, thus effectively creating its reputation as a diverse, global hub of academic and artistic exchange. Her bequest of her books and papers to the BSR throughout her life, and most significantly upon her death in 1943, bestowed upon us some of the most important titles in the Library and key documentation of the School's formative years (integral to our institutional history and memory). Yet, for all of her intense dedication to the School, Strong again ran into interpersonal problems that ultimately impeded her role – namely with the Director (and Strong's senior), Thomas Ashby, and his wife Caroline, whom Strong perceived (probably not inaccurately) as being overly involved in the School's day-to-day affairs. Embarrassed and frustrated by the increasingly public nature of the spat, the BSR's London-based Board terminated both Strong and Ashby's employments in 1925, an event which Strong would try to publicly play down as a resignation on mutual terms.

In her later years, Strong became increasingly conservative. A lapsed Catholic, she returned to the faith in 1917, and in her final decade she took up her religion with fervent zeal. She also became increasingly committed to Benito Mussolini and the Partito Nationale Fascista's political project, although the extent to which she agreed with the party's racist policies is unclear; at the very least, her public allegiance to the PNF's cultural heritage programme (which co-opted and revered romanitas, or Roman culture and heritage) has been interpreted as acquiescence to its broader political vision. There is still much ambivalence and vagary as to her actual political sympathies, at least just prior to WWII – this is most clearly demonstrated by the fact that in 1938, she was awarded both the British Academy's Serena Medal and the Gold Medal of the City of Rome, both ostensibly for her services towards the furtherance of Italian studies and, in the former case, by way of explicitly recognising her strengthening of British-Italian relations. Her refusal to return to the UK at the outbreak of WWII, however, all but cemented her loyalties publicly; had she indeed returned, she may well have been interred as an enemy of the state. She died at the Polidori Nursing Home on 16 September 1943, shortly after the dictator's fall, unreconciled with Mussolini's defeat. She is buried at the Campo Verano cemetery in Rome.

Biography written by Lucy Brownson (University of Sheffield), October 2022.