Anna Geddes

Anna, Lady Geddes ( Morton; 19 November 1857 – 9 June 1917) was an English social environmental activist, musician and partner in the work of Sir Patrick Geddes. During the marriage, she provided organisational and intellectual support to many of his projects, and they travelled extensively during their work together.

Early life and education Anna Geddes was born Anna Morton to an Ulster Scot merchant Frazer Morton and his wife in Liverpool on 19 November 1857, She was born into a strict Presbyterian household, She formed a social enterprise for girls in Liverpool, and in 1884 she helped to found the Environmental Society (which later evolved into the better known Social Union) along with her sister Edith and her husband James Oliphant (headmaster of a private school for young ladies in Charlotte Square), which is where she met Patrick Geddes.

Career Whilst visiting her younger sister Edith and her husband James Oliphant in 1883, she met Oliphant's colleague Patrick Geddes.

In the late 1880s, after the formation of the Edinburgh Social Union in 1885, which brought artists and musicians together for public performances, Geddes became close friends with Marjory Kennedy Fraser, and they performed piano together and shared child care. visiting the United States in late 1899 through early 1900, Her correspondence with French geographer Élisée Reclus is discussed in an article describing collaboration of Patrick Geddes within a network of contemporaneous anarchist geographers.

Personal life Geddes gave birth to their first child, Norah in 1887, followed by Alasdair and Arthur, in a rundown tenement, James Court, in the Lawnmarket, where the couple had moved to work on the Edinburgh Old Town rehabilitation schemes. They spent summers in the Dundee countryside.

Death In 1917, during a second visit to India, while she was the primary organiser of a version of the Edinburgh Summer meetings that was planned to feature Rabindranath Tagore, Geddes died from typhoid fever in Lucknow. She was cremated in India.