My friend Rosemary Davidson, who has died aged 83, had a distinguished career as an educational editor before running a gallery in Cambridge for 20 years.
She was born in Lancashire to a Scottish tax inspector and an Irish mother, though her father's itinerant career eventually turned her into a straight-talking Yorkshirewoman. From school in Leeds, she followed her brother Alan to Oxford University, where she studied modern languages at Lady Margaret Hall and picked up a hockey blue.
Both of them extended their parents' wandering ways to international horizons – Alan as a diplomat and food writer, Rosemary with educational publishing in Stuttgart. She soon cut loose to visit Alan in Washington DC and travelled widely in the US. Her return to 1950s England and work on Harrap's German dictionary proved dull alternatives and so she was off again, this time teaching English in Finland.
Meeting Mary Glasgow, the former Arts Council secretary general who had begun publishing French-language magazines for teenagers, decided her direction. London on a Vespa was becoming more exciting, and Rosemary joined Mary, launching two German magazines and another in English. After seven years, she moved to the publishers Longman, then top of the educational tree under Sir John Newsom. She initiated its audio-lingual productions and became a divisional director.
In 1978 she joined Cambridge University Press to run educational publishing and become the first woman on its executive board. There could be something of the dragon about her, but colleagues also found Rosemary to be a risk-taker.
By 1987, she had begun a second career by opening Broughton House gallery in King Street, Cambridge. Combining support for local artists with an international perspective, Rosemary introduced contemporary art into many Cambridge homes, suggesting that neither the art nor the financial outlay need be too painful. For me, looking after Kettle's Yard gallery, she was an invaluable partner-in-crime.
At the heart of her programming was Gwen Raverat, granddaughter of Charles Darwin and a pioneer of the English wood-engraving revival, whose visual work had been overshadowed by the continuing success of Period Piece, her memoir of a Cambridge childhood. In 2000, the family assigned to Rosemary an archive of more than 500 different engravings. Ever the publisher, she produced three handsome volumes that map Raverat's achievement in that medium.
Rosemary is survived by her nieces, Caroline, Pamela and Jennifer.