Lady Brassey (1839–1887)

Annie Brassey, later Lady Brassey, was born Anna Allnutt in London, England, the daughter of a wealthy wine merchant. As a young woman, she suffered serious health problems and received severe burns when she stood too close to a fireplace and her skirt caught fire.

In 1860, she married Thomas Brassey (knighted in 1881 and later Earl Brassey), a Member of Parliament and heir to a railway fortune, with whom she had five children. The family traveled together frequently aboard a luxury steam yacht called Sunbeam after their daughter Constance Alberta who died of scarlet fever at age four. Annie wrote
A Voyage in the Sunbeam (1878), describing their journey around the world in 1876–1877 with a complement of 43, including family, friends, and crew. The work showed her keen interest in botany and nature, developed in childhood. Her other travel journals included Sunshine and Storm in the East (1880), In the Trades, the Tropics, and the Roaring Forties (1885), and The Last Voyage (1889), published posthumously. She was also an accomplished photographer, and exhibited some of her work in Royal Photographic Society exhibitions in 1873 and 1886. She died at age 47, on a voyage to Mauritius, and was buried at sea.