Lina Duff Gordon (1874–1964)

Caroline Lucie "Lina" Waterfield, née Duff Gordon, was the daughter of Sir Maurice Duff Gordon and Frances Waterton. On the death of her mother in 1889, Lina became the ward of her paternal aunt, Janet Ross, also born Duff Gordon. Her paternal grandmother Lucie, Lady Duff Gordon, and great-grandmother Sarah Austin were famous translators and writers. Janet Ross (1842-1927), who lived at the Villa Poggio Gherardo, near Florence, Italy, was by then a famous writer herself and a prominent figure in the Anglo-Italian community. In 1902, Lina married Aubrey Waterfield, a painter. The couple restored and lived in the Renaissance-era fortified property of La Fortezza della Brunella at Aulla in the Lunigiana, and returned to Florence to manage a school at Poggio Gherardo in the 1930s. They were forced to Italy in 1940 at the start of World War II. Lina Waterfield worked as the Italian correspondent for The Observer from 1921 until 1939, and as a foreign correspondent for Kelmsley Press from 1946 to 1950. She was one of the founders of the British Institute in Florence in 1917. She published her autobiography, Castle in Italy, in 1961.