Julia Briggs; literary scholar who wrote highly readable biographies of Virginia Woolf and E. Nesbit
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September 3, 2007
Julia Briggs
Decorously rebellious literary scholar who wrote highly readable
biographies of Virginia Woolf and E. Nesbit
Julia Briggs brought a diligent, pioneering spirit to an academic
life. She wrote a series of diverse, highly readable, ever-questioning
books which illuminate the ghost story, the Jacobean social setting,
E. Nesbit, Virginia Woolf's fiction - and the Mayflower. All these
display a style redolent of the astute and easy manner which gained
her that rare thing, her students' esteem.
Julia Ruth Ballam was born in 1943, shortly after her mother,
Gertrude, a designer who had left school at 15, had heard of her
younger brother's death in India - to where her husband, Harry Ballam,
was shortly posted for RAF service.
Brought up in Highgate, North London, Julia Ballam had that burden of
expectation common among war babies. Able to read by three, she
studied at South Hampstead High School but more influential was her
father, a highly romantic man who, with hopes of writing, had produced
two anthologies but worked in advertising until his early death in
1961. The house was full of books, and family walks invariably paused
by the Rossettis' grave.
Always deeply self-critical, she worked hard and wanted to study
English at Oxford. The school thought her not good enough; her
widowed, impoverished mother paid for a cramming school, from which
she applied to Oxford and Cambridge: no sooner had Girton offered a
scholarship than St Hilda's did so too - and, shamelessly, South
Hampstead added her to its honours board.
After becoming pregnant in 1964 she was allowed to continue studying,
but was denied the rest of her scholarship and was obliged to marry
the father, Peter Gold; he duly left for South America while telling
their friend, Robin Briggs, to keep an eye on her, an instruction
which this 17th-century historian took further: they were married in
1969, her son acquiring the surname he in due course shared with two
more boys.
Amid this turbulence, she completed a BLitt on the 19th-century ghost
story and taught in various establishments before winning a fellowship
at Hertford College in 1978. By then her thesis had become Night
Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (1977) which,
dedicated to her father's memory, chronicled the ghost story, with
welcome emphasis upon J. S. Le Fanu. In 1983 came The Stage-Play
World, a brisk, popular account of the background to diverse writers'
work in Elizabethan and Jacobean times when "as much as half the
population lived at subsistence level, while all were liable to sudden
pain, incurable sickness and early death".
Within four years, after securing previously unknown papers from Doris
Langley Moore and undertaking many other journeys, she had produced A
Woman of Passion, a hefty biography of E. Nesbit, the author of The
Railway Children. She also served on education committees, which
eventually brought her the appointment to OBE.
Briggs had a decorously rebellious spirit, even modest: whenever asked
about her line of work, she said that she was a teacher. She was
always concerned for her students, always encouraging (and much
pleased, for example, by Andrea Ashworth's success with Once in a
House on Fire). Although among those who prevented Mrs Thatcher's
honorary doctorate, she was equally vexed by the Blair Government's
educational shortfalls.
Her work on Virginia Woolf was interrupted in 1999 by breast cancer
which she endured resiliently; her book, published in 2005, was
completed during a joyful Sorbonne sabbatical, and dedicated to her
sister Anthea, to whom she was close (they collaborated on Mayflower:
The Voyage That Changed the World, 2003). Rooted in all the
manuscripts, her account of Woolf brilliantly and engagingly returned
the writer to her novels.
Never wanting to claim any one period and milk it endlessly, she
produced four books which will find readers for a long while. She had
many more ideas in mind. After wearying of Oxford in the mid1990s, she
had sold her house to buy flats in Brighton and Bloomsbury, from which
she travelled for work as Professor of English Literature at
DeMontfort University.
There now seemed plenty of time, but when cancer returned as a brain
tumour six months ago, she kept remarkably cheerful, finding peace in
her allotment, the only crisis being a sudden inability to understand
words. With typical resourcefulness, she taught herself to read again,
and when she could no longer take in the edges of the pages, she
enjoyed good children's books, her mind sharp enough to plan her
funeral. She always had style and grace.
She and Robin Briggs were divorced and she is survived by three sons,
one of whom, Simon, is a cricket correspondent for The Daily
Telegraph.
Professor Julia Briggs, OBE, literary scholar and writer, was born on
December 30, 1943. She died of cancer on August 16, 2007, aged 63