Mary Stella Edwards

Mary Stella Edwards (1898–1989) was an English painter, creator of dioramas and poet.

Biography Mary Stella Edwards was born in Hampstead in 1898, the daughter of Robert Cromwell Edwards an architect. She grew up at 12 Fairfield Avenue, in Staines, Middlesex (now part of Surrey).

Edwards studied art at the Royal College of Art and The Regent Street Polytechnic (now part of the University of Westminster) where she met fellow student Judith Ackland. They became life partners and used a tiny cabin, a former fisherman's store, dating from the mid-19th century, at Bucks Mills as their studio from 1924 until Ackland's death in 1971.

Together with Ackland, Edwards produced dioramas, Ackland made all the models (she invented a method called "Jackanda" to make the models), and Edwards painted their backdrops.

Edwards was also a poet and published several volumes throughout her life. The London antique dealer Maggs Bros Ltd has a copy Edwards dedicated to Irish publisher and book collector Alan Clodd, who in 1967 published her works with his Enitharmon Press. Individual poems subsequently appeared in Thomas Moult's The Best Poems of 1930, Art, Prose and Poetry, The Contemporary Review and The Living Age. She also published poetry between 1962 and 1964 in Literary Criticism Teaching edited by Margaret Willy for the Oxford University Press. In 1968 she published A Truce with Time and in 1978 Before and After, with poems in memory of her late partner, Judith Ackland: these poems, according to May Sarton, "express the long-standing affection and solidarity of these two remarkable women and give strength to make unbearable bearable". The volume was published by Enitharmon Press, as did Years Between (1982) and A Further Harvest (1985) with unpublished poems from the period between 1932 and 1984.