Background

Mary Hyde Eccles was born on July 8, 1912, in Detroit, Michigan, into a wealthy family. She was the daughter of Stanford and Emma Crapo.

Education

Mary Hyde Eccles earned a Bachelor of Arts from Vassar College in 1934. There she became friends with novelist Mary McCarthy. Followed by graduate work at Columbia University, where Hyde Eccles received her master's degree in 1936 and doctorate in 1947.

Career

Mary Hyde Eccles began collecting books in earnest after marrying her first husband, an attorney who shared this passion. Together they amassed an impressive library at Four Oaks Farm in New Jersey that included rare books and papers from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries in 1943. As a result of her growing expertise, Hyde Eccles also served on various advisory councils and committees for the University of Chicago, Princeton University, and Harvard University and was a member of the advisory council for the Private Papers of Boswell. Hyde Eccles married David Eccles, 1st Viscount Eccles in 1984, and they founded the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library in 1992.

Additionally, Mary Hyde Eccles was a writer. She was the author of Playwriting for Elizabethans, 1600-1605, Catalogus Bibliothecae Hydeianae: The Hyde Collection of Works of Samuel Johnson, and Four Oaks Library, as well as the coeditor of several scholarly works, including The Impossible Friendship: Boswell and Mrs. Thrale and Bernard Shaw and Alfred Douglas: A Correspondence.

Achievements

• Mary Hyde Eccles was well known as a writer and book collector. With her first husband, Donald Frizell Hyde, she purchased Four Oaks Farm and amassed an impressive library. With her second husband, David Eccles, 1st Viscount Eccles, Hyde Eccle founded the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library in 1992. Additionally, Mary Hyde Eccles was an Honorary Fellow of Samuel Johnson's college at Oxford, Pembroke College.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Impossible Friendship

    (Having recognized each other as rivals from the outset, J...)

    1973
  • Mary Hyde Eccles

    (This book presents a selection of Eccles's writings, both...)

    2002
  • Playwriting for Elizabethans, 1600-1605 1949
  • Bernard Shaw and Alfred Douglas 1982

Membership

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  Mary Hyde Eccles was a Benjamin Franklin Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

  Royal Society of Arts , United Kingdom

• Roxburghe Club , United Kingdom

  1985 - 2003

Connections

Mary Hyde Eccles married Donald Hyde on September 16, 1939. He died in 1966. Then Hyde Eccles married David Eccles, 1st Viscount Eccles, on September 26, 1984.

Father:

Stanford Tappan Crapo

Mother:

Emma Caroline Crapo

Emma Crapo's maiden name was Morley.

husband:

David McAdam Eccles

Friend:

Mary Therese McCarthy

Mary McCarthy was an American critic and novelist whose fiction was noted for its wit and acerbity in analyzing the finer moral nuances of intellectual dilemmas.

Late Husband:

Donald Frizell Hyde

Donald Frizell Hyde was Mary Hyde Eccles's first husband. He passed away in 1966.