Briggs, Julia 1943-2007
Briggs, Julia 1943-2007
OBITUARY NOTICE—
See index for CA sketch: Born December 30, 1943, in England; died of cancer, August 16, 2007, in London, England. Educator and author. Beyond calling her a scholar of literature, Briggs was not easily categorized. Her first book, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (1977), added the names of relatively contemporary characters like Jekyll, Hyde, and Dorian Gray (among others) to the canon of legitimate English literature. Her next book, This Stage-Play World: English Literature and Its Background, 1580-1625 (1983), takes the reader backward a few centuries to explain what life was like in the days of such authors as Thomas Beard, once well known but now relatively obscure. Briggs also wrote about authors more familiar to British school children than to American readers in books like A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit, 1858-1924 (1987), the biography of a once-popular British children's writer, whose full name was Edith Nesbit Bland. One of her last publications was the biography Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (2005). Briggs taught English literature at Hertford College, Oxford, then moved to DeMontfort University in the 1990s. She was decorated as an officer of the Order of the British Empire for her work on behalf of education.
OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:
PERIODICALS
Times (London, England), September 3, 2007, p. 46.