Caroline Spurgeon

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Caroline Francis Eleanor Spurgeon (born October 24, 1869 in India , † October 24, 1942 in Tucson , Arizona ) was an English literary scholar (English studies), known for her work on Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare . She was the first female professor at an English university.

Life

Spurgeon was born in India as the daughter of a British officer (Captain Christopher Spurgeon). Her mother died giving birth and her father five years later. She spent her youth in France and Germany. Spurgeon attended Cheltenham College in Gloucestershire and studied at the University of Dresden , Kings College in London and University College London (where she was a Morley Medalist). She was preparing for exams at the Oxford Honors School of English Language, which she graduated with top marks in 1899. From 1900 she taught English literature at night schools in London, where in 1901 she was an assistant professor at Bedford College, London University (assistant lecturer) In 1906 she became a lecturer in English literature and from 1913 to 1929 Professor (Hildred Carlile Chair) of English literature (the first female professor at a London university and at an English university at all) and chair of the faculty the Sorbonne in Paris for "Chaucer devant la critique en Angleterre et en France depuis son temps jusqu'a nos jours" (Paris 1911), where she had worked for a decade, a doctorate under Émile Legouis . in 1929 she received a in England Doctorate in Literature - from the University of London for "Five hundred years of Chaucer criticism and allusion 1357-1900" (Cambridge University Press 1925) 3 her book "Mysticism in english literature" was published by Cambridge University Press. In 1916 she became a "Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature".

In 1918 she was on an exchange program for the British Education Board in the USA, where she met Virginia Gildersleeve (1877-1965), then Dean of Barnard College at Columbia University in New York , with whom she was from then on a lifelong friendship. They regularly spent the summers in the Downs, where they bought a country house near Alciston in 1925 , and the fall in New York, where she was visiting professor at Columbia University in 1920/2. Meta Tuke, dean of Bedford College, and Lilian Clapham, a senior civil servant, also belonged to the circle of friends. In 1936, Spurgeon moved to the arid climate of Tucson, Arizona, because of her arthritis, where she died in 1942. Caroline Spurgeon was buried next to her close friend, Lilian Clapham, who died in 1935, in Alciston.

Spurgeon is best known for her book “Shakespeare's Imagery and what it tells us”, published in 1935 by Cambridge University Press , which was created after ten years of preparation and in which she examines in detail the use of visual metaphors in Shakespeare's plays and draws conclusions about his biography and person seeks to pull. According to her, they point to a rural background and not to an academic or courtly environment. This part of her investigation had also been the subject of criticism that she would naively exaggerate these conclusions; Sometimes people also scoffed at reading the image of a Victorian gentleman into Shakespeare . Spurgeon shows how individual dramas are dominated by certain pictorial motifs and also highlights clear differences in the use of metaphors to authors such as Christopher Marlowe , Ben Jonson and Francis Bacon (who was the subject of the William Shakespeare authorship debate in the 19th century ).

From 1920 to 1921, Spurgeon was the first female president of the International Federation of University Women , which she founded with Gildersleeve.

Signature 1929

Fonts

  • Mein Arbeitsweg (1929), in: Elga Kern (Ed.): Leading Women in Europe , Munich 1999 [1928], pp. 88–92

Web links

Sources and Notes

  1. ↑ At that time women were not allowed to study in Oxford
  2. ^ A college for women. The University of London was one of the first in England where women could study.
  3. ↑ Who was Virginia Gildersleeve? . IFUW. Archived from the original on October 24, 2013. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved May 23, 2013. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ifuw.org
  4. ↑ She is known for drafting the preamble to the United Nations as the only female member of the US delegation in San Francisco in 1945 . Thanks for the campaign support from Roosevelt.
  5. ↑ She previously published "Leading motives in the imagery of Shakespeares tragedies", London 1930 and "Shakespeare's iterative imagery", London 1931
  6. ^ Rene Wellek: "History of literary criticism 1750-1950", de Gruyter Verlag, vol. 4, p. 160.
personal data
SURNAME Spurgeon, Caroline
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Spurgeon, Caroline Francis Eleanor (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English literary scholar
DATE OF BIRTH October 24, 1869
PLACE OF BIRTH India
DATE OF DEATH October 24, 1942
Place of death Tucson , Arizona , United States