Dear everyone
It is with great sadness that I write that Julia Briggs, Professor of Literature and Women's Studies at De Montfort University, died yesterday. Julia was a wonderful scholar, colleague and friend. Beside her remarkable critical and biographical work on Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Middleton, Edith Nesbit and many others -- she disdained narrowness, in all things -- she was also a fine editor (thus, her work on Virginia Woolf, and more recently on Middleton), and the moving force behind the online Hockliffe collection and many another editorial enterprise. She gave the ESTS great support in its early days: her essay on Hope Mirlees' Paris is one of the glories of our first number of Variants. Personally, I owed her a great debt as she was the prime mover in bringing me to De Montfort and then in established the Centre for Technology and the Arts (now, the Centre for Textual Scholarship) as a happy academic home for many years for myself, always with extensive visiting rights for Julia.
There is a rather nice obituary (refreshingly honest, for this genre: Julia might have appreciated that) for her at
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article2871464.ece
In so many ways, she was what is best in academic life -- and indeed, with her zest and generosity, so much what is best in all life. She will be much missed.
Peter Robinson
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