Dr. Judith Hinchcliffe of Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, died on Friday,
January 17, 2003 of Progressive Supranuclear Palsy. Spenserians
interested in book VI of the _Faerie Queene_ will remember the article
on her favourite work that she published (I think under her maiden name,
Judith Ramsay) in the _University of Toronto Quarterly_ in the
late1960s, which produced an immediate (and to a grad student very
flattering) response from Alastair Fowler. Her doctoral thesis, "The
steele-head speare and the shepheards hooke; a study of book VI of The
Faerie queene" (1971), was supervised by Millar MacLure. Before her
doctoral work she had taught at the University of Western Ontario and
after it at the University of Waterloo and Conestoga College, but
retired from academic life in the 1980s. Judith had a lively interest
in the theatre and especially in Renaissance English drama, and was an
enthusiastic member of the Stratford Festival audience until illness
made that impossible. In 1984 she published the lengthy and thoroughly
researched _King Henry VI, parts 1, 2, and 3 : an annotated
bibliography_ (New York: Garland, 1984). Judith had a vivid wit and a
sharp mind; she was among the most engaging and respected graduate
students of her era at Toronto. Her illness was a tragic one, isolating
her mind, which remained as keen as always, within a catastrophically
disintegrating physical fabric. As her life was drawing to a close, her
daughter Margaret (who programmes web sites for the University of
Waterloo's Engineering Department) and her husband Peter (a Victorianist
recently retired from St. Jerome's College, University of Waterloo, read
aloud to her the entire _Faerie Queene_, a session every morning
(Margaret) and one every evening (Peter). It took two and a half
months. As Peter said after her funeral yesterday," in a way it's a good
thing she couldn't tell us if she was enjoying it as we were going
through some of the really slow bits. But she lived to hear her
favourite, book VI, once more." Judith was a dear and intellectually
demanding companion of my graduate school days, and would have delighted
in this Spenserian conclusion to her admirable life. Germaine Warkentin
--
***********************************************************************
Germaine Warkentin // English (Emeritus)
VC 205, Victoria College (University of Toronto),
73 Queen's Park Crescent East, Toronto, Ont. M5S 1K7, CANADA
[log in to unmask] (fax number on request)
***********************************************************************
|