Personal Life
She was active in numerous societies, including the London arm of the International Pen Club in London, where she was president from 1951-57, as well as the Society of Authors (president, 1972-77) and the London Library. She served on the Arts Council from 1958 to 1961 and the Advisory Council of the Victoria and Albert Museum from 1960-69, and was twice a trustee of the National Gallery (1962-68 and 1969-76), and its first female trustee. She was a member of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts from 1953 to 1978 and president of the English Association for 1955-56. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1975.
In 1966 she was one of 49 writers who signed a letter appealing to the Soviet Union for the release of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel from imprisonment based on the "literary and artistic merits" of their work and rejecting the characterization of it as "propaganda". In her later years she was an admirer of Margaret Thatcher.
In her last years she suffered from Alzheimer's disease. She died on 9 March 1997 at St Thomas' Hospital in London. She was a lesbian. Her partner of almost 70 years, Jacqueline Hope-Wallace, who had a career in the British civil service, survived her. Wedgwood and Hope-Wallace owned a country house together near Polegate in Sussex. Both came from musical families. Wedgwood's father was cousin to Vaughan Williams and the dedicatee of his London Symphony. Hope-Wallace's brother Philip (1911—1979) was for various periods music and drama critic of the Times, Times and Tide and the Manchester Guardian. She edited a collection of his writings as Words and Music (1981) for which Wedgwood wrote the introduction. In 1997, Hope-Wallace donated a 1944 oil portrait of Wedgwood by Sir Lawrence Gowing to the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Read more about this topic: Veronica Wedgwood
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