[1] Anna Hornby was educated at the independent Westonbirt School, Gloucestershire.
[1] She went on to study art in Florence with landscape and flower painter Aubrey Waterfield in 1934, and later that year enrolled at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London where she studied under Francis Ernest Jackson, graduating in 1940.
[1] In 1952 Hornby was appointed Honorary Secretary of the Society for Italic Handwriting, a post she held until 1962.
Through her interest in calligraphy and her association with the Society, Hornby became acquainted with Alfred John Fairbank, whose portrait she painted (exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1961).
[4] Anna Hornby died in 1996, bequeathing paintings by Peter Greenham and Francis Ernest Jackson to the Ashmolean Museum of Art, Oxford.