Dorothea Hosie

Dorothea Hosie , also known as Dorothea, Lady Hosie (1885 – 15 February 1959) was a British amateur film maker and writer on China. She assisted her father and her husband, Alexander Hosie, with their writing but when they died she published books on her own account. During the Second World War she was vice-principal of an evacuated private school in Somerset.

Life Hosie was born in Ningbo in China in 1885. Her parents were Lucy and William Edward Soothill; her father was a Methodist missionary. Her parents wanted to call her Dorothy but the British diplomat who registered her birth decided that Dorothea was much better. She was educated in Cambridge at Newnham College.

She married Sir Alexander Hosie (1853–1925), more than thirty years her senior, in 1913. He had served as the British consul on Pagoda Island, near Fuzhou in China, and was a respected plant collector in western China, Tibet and Taiwan. The genus Hosiea was named in his honour. He was also the author of Three Years in Western China (1890) and On the Trail of Opium Poppy (2 vols., 1914). and she wrote more on her own account. Portrait of a Chinese Lady followed in 1929. In 1930 she met Miss Gladys Muriel Starkey who worked at Brampton Down School, Kent. This would be a long friendship.

She edited her father William Edward Soothill's translation of the Analects of Confucius which was published by Oxford University Press in 1937.

In 1938 she became the vice-principal of Brampton Down Girls' School. The school was evacuated to Henlade House at Ruishton in Somerset.

After Hosie's death, Gladys remained at Appletree Cottage until her own death in 1965.

Works Two Gentlemen of China, 1924, 5th edn 1929. Portrait of a Chinese Lady, 1929 and 1938 edn. Brave New China, 1938/1940. The Pool of Ch’ien Lung, 1944. Jesus and Woman, 1946, (American edn, 1954, as The Master Calleth for Thee and in Britain as Jesus and Woman, 1956).