Partner Edith Lowber
Queer Places:
Bryn Mawr College (Seven Sisters), 101 N Merion Ave, Bryn Mawr, PA 19010
Yarrow East, Wyndon Avenue, Bryn Mawr, PA 19010
Georgiana Goddard King (August 5, 1871 – May 4, 1939) was an American pioneer Hispanist, medievalist, author, photographer, and educator who founded the
Department of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, establishing the first academic department in the United States to specialize in Spanish art.
Born in West Columbia, West Virginia, King attended Bryn Mawr College, earning her Bachelor of Arts in 1896 and her Master of Arts in 1898. Following extensive travel and study across Europe—particularly in Paris, where she spent the year 1898–1899—she worked as a high school teacher in New York City from 1899 to 1906, writing plays and translating late medieval Spanish poetry. She returned to Bryn Mawr in 1906 as a reader in English, added a role as lecturer in art in 1910, and led the newly organized History of Art Department from 1913 until her retirement in 1937, becoming a full professor in 1916.
King's academic and creative life was deeply intertwined with avant-garde feminist and queer intellectual circles of the early twentieth century. During her time in New York and Paris, she developed a close friendship with Gertrude Stein, watching Stein’s modern art collection grow and reviewing her writings. Highly influenced by emancipated women such as Stein and Bryn Mawr President M. Carey Thomas, King embraced a life of independence and romantic relationships with women. Around 1908, King formed a profound partnership with Edith Hunn Lowber, presenting her with a handmade, leather-bound volume of romantic poetry titled A First Book of Desire. The two lived on campus at Yarrow East and embarked on numerous joint photographic expeditions across Spain, Portugal, and France between 1911 and 1925, traveling by train, oxcart, and donkey to document remote Romanesque and Gothic monuments. Moving within international artistic networks, King and Lowber frequently visited Bernard Berenson in Florence and connected with author Vernon Lee and her partner Kit Anstruther-Thomson.
As a scholar, King made landmark contributions to medieval art history, publishing foundational texts including The Way of St. James (1920), Brief Account of the Military Orders of Spain (1921), The Pre-Romanesque Churches of Spain (1924), and Mudéjar (1927), as well as a widely acclaimed editing of George Edmund Street's Gothic Architecture in Spain. Many of these publications featured photographs taken jointly during the King-Lowber expeditions, blending rigorous archaeological research with pictorialist and modernist photography. Between 1912 and 1926, King and Lowber collaborated on The Heart of Spain, an integrated study of Spanish art and literature that was eventually edited by Agnes Mongan and published posthumously in 1941. King’s scholarly authority earned her membership in the Hispanic Society of America and the Royal Galician Academy, and she was distinguished as the only female member of two learned societies in Spain.
Following her retirement from Bryn Mawr in 1937, King moved to Hollywood, California, in 1935, where she lived near her sisters, Margaret Goddard King and Mrs. John Adams, and her brother, Arthur King. She died in Hollywood on May 4, 1939, at the age of sixty-seven. Her remains were brought back to Pennsylvania and interred in the cloisters of the Old Library at Bryn Mawr College.
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