Anna Cogswell Wood

Anna "Annie" Cogswell Wood (born in Winchester, VA, August 2, 1850, died in Florence, Italy, February 9, 1940) was an American writer, art collector, teacher, and the co-founder of Leache-Wood Seminary in Norfolk, Virginia. When writing, she wrote under both her own name and the pseudonym Algernon Ridgeway. Upon the death of her friend, Irene Leache, she founded the Irene Leache Memorial Collection, now a part of the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk.

Life Wood's father was Algernon Ridgeway Wood, a Virginia General Assemblyman who married Louisa Cogswell. In 1850 he moved his wife and newborn daughter, Annie Cogswell Wood, to New York. The Cogswells were an illustrious family, with a lineage stretching to the Colonial era. In 1865, Wood's aunt, Elizabeth Lord Cogswell Dixon, married James Dixon, a United States Representative and Senator from Connecticut and close ally to President Abraham Lincoln. Elizabeth Dixon and her sister, Mary Cogswell Kinney, befriended Mary Todd Lincoln, President Lincoln's wife, during the tumult of the Civil War. When president Lincoln was shot, a distraught Lincoln sent a messenger to summon her close friends Elizabeth Dixon and Mary Kinney from their homes in Lafayette Square. Wood and Leache are both buried at Elmwood Cemetery, Norfolk City, Virginia.

Works Diana Fontaine. A novel, Philadelphia, J.B. Lippincott Company, 1891 Westover's ward, London, R. Bentley, 1892 The story of a friendship. A memoir, New York, Knickerbocker Press, 1901 Idyls and impressions of travel from the note-books of two friends, New York & Washington, Neale Pub. Co., 1904 Drama sketches for parlor acting or recitation, Florence, Editori Librai, 1925 The great opportunity and other essays, Florence, Italy, 1926 The psychology of crime illustrated by several modern poets, Florence, TIP. Giuntina