Anne Olivier Bell, "who edited the diaries of Virginia Woolf into five landmark volumes and was a rare surviving link to the Bloomsbury Group," died July 18, the New York Times reported. She was 102. Bell "was also thought to be among the last members of the so-called Monuments Men, a unit that worked to protect and recover artworks during and after World War II." Their exploits were chronicled in the book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel, with Bret Witter; as well as the 2014 film Monuments Men.
"I haven't any imagination," she told the Telegraph in 2014. "But I was lucky to spend my life among fascinating people."
Bell was a research assistant at the Ministry of Information during World War II, and in 1945 she was recruited to join the the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section. "She was sent to the British zone of occupied Germany, where she coordinated the activities of officers in the field, who were trying to repair damaged churches and other things of architectural or artistic significance," the Times wrote.
After her return to England in 1947, she was working at the Arts Council of Britain, editing catalogues and helping to prepare exhibitions, when she met the artist Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf's sister. She married Quentin Bell, a son of Vanessa and Clive Bell, in 1952.
She assisted her husband in the writing of his 1972 book Virginia Woolf: A Biography, and in 1977, she published The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 1. She would edit four more volumes; the last was published in 1984. In the 1980s, she helped found the Charleston Trust, an organization dedicated to preserving a farmhouse associated with the Bloomsbury Group.