Deaths of Virginia Woolf scholars
There were several losses to Woolf studies in 2007, among them Julia Briggs, Brownlee Kirkpatrick and Joanne Trautmann Banks.
Julia Ruth Briggs (1943–2007)
Julia Briggs began her publishing career with the subject of the ghost story and moved – via the highly original route of Elizabethan literature, William Golding and Edith Nesbit – to the subject of Virginia Woolf. She edited and wrote introductions to Woolf’s works, and recently completed two significant studies: Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (Allen Lane, 2005), combining literary criticism with biography; and Reading Virginia Woolf (EUP, 2006), a compilation of her own articles. In 2001 she gave the second Virginia Woolf Annual Birthday Lecture, ‘This Moment I Stand On’: Woolf and the Spaces in Time (see VWB7, 78–9).
Julia was a great support to the VWSGB and took part in a number of its activities. She presented talks at the ‘Virginia in Cambridge’ study weeks in 2000 and 2006, spoke on ‘Virginia Woolf with Pen in Hand’ at the 2005 AGM, and was elected to the Executive Council at the AGM in April 2006. Her recent books on Virginia Woolf were reviewed in VWB20 (An Inner Life) and VWB24 (Reading Virginia Woolf). In the centrefold of VWB25 is a photograph of Julia at her last VWSGB event, the 125th Birthday Weekend (January 2007).
Julia died from a brain tumour in the Royal Marsden Hospital on 16 August 2007, aged 63. Obituaries appeared in the Independent on 17 August 2007 (http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article2871464.ece), the Guardian on 30 August 2007 (http://books.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,2158454,00.html) and The Times on 3 September 2007 (www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article2373545.ece).
Brownlee Jean Kirkpatrick (1919–2007)
One of the first members of the VWSGB, B. J. Kirkpatrick was the compiler and editor of A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf in 1957, with a second edition in 1967, a third in 1980 and a fourth (with Stuart N. Clarke) in 1997. She contacted Leonard Woolf for help with the first and second editions, and he gave it in spades, sending her foreign translations of Woolf’s books, inviting her many times to Monks House (presenting her with flowers and fruit on her return to London) and allowing her full access to his collection of his wife’s works. For her part, Brownlee helped to unearth a number of the essays which were published by Leonard Woolf in Granite and Rainbow (1958). In 1989 she made the further discovery of more than 40 Times Literary Supplement reviews by Woolf, which will be published in an appendix of vol. VI of the Essays (ed. Stuart N. Clarke). CHECK
Additionally, Brownlee published bibliographies of E. M. Forster (which he personally commended), Edmund Blunden and Katherine Mansfield. Leonard Woolf calculated her rate of pay on the bibliographies as about a farthing an hour; but they were chiefly labours of love – her daily bread was earned at the British Museum, where she was a librarian in the Department of Ethnography.
Brownlee died on 24 May 2007, aged 88. For more on B. J. Kirkpatrick, see Stuart N. Clarke’s memoir in VWB26, 60–2. An obituary appeared in the Independent on 23 June 2007, see: http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article2697834.ece.
Joanne Trautmann Banks (1941–2007)
Joanne Trautmann (as she was then) is best known for her collaboration with Nigel Nicolson on the editing of Virginia Woolf’s letters. A Minnesota-born academic, she met Nicolson in 1971 while researching the friendship between Woolf and Vita Sackville-West (publishing the results as The Jessamy Brides, Pennsylvania State UP, 1973). Impressed by her writing and seeing that she was perfectly placed to work on the many Woolf letters that were stored in American archives, Nicolson asked her to partner him on the enormous task. Because of Nicolson and Trautmann’s research, we are now able to ascertain at a glance the locations of most Woolf letters, but in the early 1970s the detective work necessary to discover the whereabouts of the letters was lengthy and painstaking. This was only the start, of course – there was much transcribing, editing and annotating to do. Meanwhile Trautmann also had a challenging day job – to design a literature course for students at a Pennsylvania medical college. She later became something of an expert at combining the seemingly disparate cultures of literature and medicine. In 1989 she returned to her Woolfian interests when she edited a selection of Woolf’s letters – with eleven new additions – as Congenial Spirits (Hogarth Press).
Joanne died from ovarian cancer on 5 May 2007, aged 65. An obituary appeared in the Independent on 10 May 2007, see: www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/joanne-trautmann-banks-448147.html.
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