Biography
Constance Auden (1869-1941) was the mother of the poet, W. H. Auden (1907-1973), who was born in York. She married George Augustus Auden in Kensington, London in 1899 and died in Birmingham, aged 72. She had trained (but never served) as a missionary nurse, whilst her husband was a physician. The Audens were minor gentry with a strong clerical tradition. W. H. Auden wrote For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio (1944), in memoriam to his mother. Sir Kenneth Clark purchased her portrait by William Coldstream from the Leicester Gallereis, London and gifted it to the Contemporary Art Society in 1946 when it was donated to the Potteries Museum, Stoke on Trent.