Anna Botsford Comstock (September 1, 1854 – August 24, 1930) was an acclaimed author, illustrator, and educator of natural studies.

Comstock worked with Liberty Hyde Bailey, John Walton Spencer, Alice McCloskey, Julia Rogers, and Ada Georgia as part of the department of Nature Study at Cornell University.

[3] As the only child of the family, education was important both in a school house and at home where Comstock and her Quaker mother spent time together examining the wildflowers, birds, and trees.

Phebe Botsford shared her passionate love of nature with her daughter, Anna, taking her into the nearby woods and fields.

Here Anna learned "...the popular names of sixty or more common flowers; she taught her a dozen constellations..."[4] In 1871, as there was no high school in Otto, Comstock attended the Chamberlain Institute and Female College, one of two seminaries under the direction of the Methodist Church in Randolph, New York.

Upon arriving at Cornell, Comstock found that she had to take several examinations in order to enter, and particularly needed tutoring in German.

[9] When she returned to Cornell in 1875, she was part of the first group of thirty-three young women to move into the newly built Sage College on campus.

[11] Their friendship bloomed into a romance and marriage (October 7, 1878) and she quietly withdrew from student life to that of the responsibilities of a young professor's wife at the fledgling university.

[14] Comstock became a member of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority (November 4, 1882), and she was one of the first women elected to the honorary society of Sigma Xi at Cornell in 1888.

She studied wood engraving at Cooper Union, New York City, so she could prepare illustrations for her husband's book Introduction to Entomology in 1888.

[15] She was the third woman to become a member of the Society of American Wood-Engravers,[18] and has been recognized as its most prolific producer of original (as opposed to reproductive) images.

[23][24] The horticulturist Liberty Hyde Bailey and her husband both told her they expected The Handbook of Nature Study to lose money, but it became a standard textbook for teachers and was later translated into eight languages, with over twenty printings.

[29] The new edition, based on six years of research, attempts to convey "a better sense of what Anna was truly like" by presenting what survives of her actual writings, including accounts of her "marriage, travel, teaching, and scientific study".