ISJ October 2019: Obituary: Edna Murphy, Founder and Editor of ISJ, 1981 -2003

Joe Murphy

Edna died shortly after her eighty-eighth birthday as a result of injuries sustained by a fall which brought an end to a long twilight of her later life shadowed by Alzheimer’s. Edna was born and educated in New York, where her first job was as assistant to the director of the Council on Foreign Relations. After moving to the Washington area, she obtained a Master of Arts in Teaching at George Washington University and began her career in education as a primary school teacher in a local state school. Accompanying her husband during his assignments in Europe, she became Deputy Head of the Pershing Hall School in Paris in the late fifties and later, in England, she taught at the American Community School in London before becoming the Head-mistress of the Hampstead International School. From there, she moved to take over the large Elementary Division of the International School of Brussels, from which she retired in 1995.