Dame Helen Gardner(1908–1986)
Dame Helen Louise Gardner, DBE, FRSL
The Finchley schoolmaster's daughter who took a starred First at St Hilda's Oxford in 1929, became the Merton Professor of English Literature, edited the definitive editions of Donne, and produced the New Oxford Book of English Verse that set post-war academic poetic taste.
Helen Louise Gardner was born at Finchley in north London on 13 February 1908, only daughter of the headmaster of the Stationers' Company's School and a teacher. She was schooled at the North London Collegiate School, took the London Matriculation with first-class results in all six subjects at seventeen, and was admitted on the open scholarship to St Hilda's College Oxford in 1926.
She read English Language and Literature at Oxford under the post-Quiller-Couch Honours School syllabus and took the final examinations in 1929 with a starred First, the Oxford English-school first-class degree of her year, and was the first woman to win the Charles Oldham Shakespeare Prize the same year. The starred First and the Oldham together were the launch of her career.
She held a junior lectureship at Royal Holloway College from 1934 and returned to Oxford in 1941 on a St Hilda's College tutorial fellowship. The Oxford period from 1941 to 1975 was the productive register of her career: The Art of T. S. Eliot (1949), the foundational post-war academic study of the modernist poet, The Business of Criticism (1959), and Religion and Literature (1971).
Her two most-cited contributions were the reference editions of John Donne: The Divine Poems (1952) and The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets (1965), which remained the standard editions of the Donne canon for the half-century after, and the editorial work on T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and collected critical prose that produced the contemporary reference edition of the Eliot canon.
She was appointed Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford in 1966, the chair of the discipline, holding it for nine years, and was created DBE in 1967. Her New Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1950 (1972), the revision of the standard Oxford-Press anthology, set the late-twentieth-century revision of the English-poetic canon. She died at Oxford on 4 June 1986, seventy-eight years old, and is buried at Holywell Cemetery. The Gardner name, the Norman-French occupational gardinier, she carried from a Finchley schoolmaster's family into the senior post-war English-Department-Oxford establishment.
Achievements
- ·Starred First, English Language and Literature, St Hilda's College Oxford, 1929
- ·Royal Holloway College assistant lecturer, 1934 to 1941
- ·St Hilda's College Oxford tutorial fellow, 1941 to 1966
- ·The Art of T. S. Eliot published, 1949
- ·Critical text edition of John Donne's Divine Poems, OUP, 1952
- ·Merton Professor of English Literature, Oxford, 1966 to 1975
- ·Created DBE, 1967
- ·New Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1950 edited, 1972
Step Into History
Walk the streets and halls Dame Helen Gardner knew — a photoreal walk through time, on foot.