Laura Marcus (7 March 1956–22 September 2021)

The six tributes included here were first delivered at the memorial event ‘Laura Marcus and Twentieth-Century Literary Studies’, a special meeting of Oxford’s Modern and Contemporary Literature Research Seminar which took place online on 20 October 2021. We have kept the tributes as they were originally delivered to retain the rhythm of that gathering. Before the event had even begun, we had reached our maximum number of attendees on Zoom (an upper limit which we had no idea existed, having never come close to it in previous events we had held online since the pandemic struck). That technical mishap was at least a powerful testament to Laura’s remarkable gifts for friendship and community, the array of people whose work she had mentored, supported, inspired or shaped, as well as the sheer reach of her influence on the discipline more broadly (it was also something that, as a self-avowed technophobe, she may have found in some way comically fitting; indeed, only last year, while trying to submit an article to the Cambridge Quarterly, she managed to upload it onto the server of the current journal instead). As the evening wore on and more and more people shared their memories, one fact became clear: a lot of academics are deeply admired and respected, but few were as deeply loved as Laura. In Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction (2018), Laura begins her chapter on ‘Autobiography and Psychoanalysis’ by quoting W.H. Auden’s description of Sigmund Freud: ‘a whole climate of opinion / under which we conduct our different lives’. For many in our generation, Laura provided that ‘climate of opinion’ under which we conducted our research into the different lives of twentieth-century literature and culture, energised by conversations with her or emboldened by her writing on an array of subjects – from life-writing, on which she worked throughout her career, to early twentieth-century women writers, particularly Virginia Woolf, to her work on cinema, modernism and psychoanalysis. Having largely completed Rhythmical Subjects: The Measures of the Modern, which will be published later this year, she was embarking on another substantial project provisionally titled ‘Autobiography in the Age of Witness’ – a study of autobiographical and related writings, as shaped by conditions of exile, from the early to mid-twentieth century. Laura’s works include Auto/biographical Discourses: Criticism, Theory, Practice (1994), Virginia Woolf: Writers and their Work (1997), The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (2007) – which won the MLA’s prestigious James Russell Lowell Prize – and Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (2014). In addition to the books she authored, she edited numerous essay collections which have shaped the field over recent decades. These include Modernity, Culture and ‘The Jew’ (1998), which she co-edited with Bryan Cheyette, The Actuality of Walter Benjamin (1998) with Lynda Nead, and The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature (2005) with Peter Nicholls. More recent collaborations include A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature and Culture (2014) with Ankhi Mukherjee, as well as Late Victorian into Modern with Michèle Mendelssohn and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, and Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, and Modernity with David Bradshaw and Rebecca Roach, both of which appeared in 2016. While she leaves behind a magisterial body of scholarship which will inform and influence future generations of modernist scholars, Laura was so much more than an academic or a scholar: she was a wonderfully humane person with a talent for connection. Whoever came in contact with her, however briefly – in conferences, seminars, dinners or social events – would immediately be struck by her loveliness, a rare blend of razor-sharp intelligence, kindness, empathy and irreverent wit. Even the most casual encounter would have a sense of intimacy and meaningfulness. The modernist scholar Doug Mao recalled meeting her for the first time at the Modernist Studies Association conference in Tokyo and going for a stroll: ‘I understood more or less at once how Laura Marcus the person was Laura Marcus the internationally famous scholar. We talked about things that were ordinary, not momentously intellectual – Laura’s plans for further travel in Asia; our students; family; friendship. But everything Laura said was fringed or suffused with insight, with a kind of non-strenuous but continuous perspicacity.’ Throughout the memorial, friends, colleagues and students kept returning to her combination of intellectual generosity and emotional warmth – memories of her loveliness became the rhythm of our mourning. At the same time, she was an academic par excellence, an abiding presence in conferences, seminars, inaugurals and book-launches on both sides of the Atlantic. Whether she was giving keynotes, chairing sessions, commenting on books or introducing people, Laura was a terrific interlocutor. Encouraging younger scholars was at the heart of her pedagogy. As of 2020, she had examined some seventy PhD dissertations and had mentored, as a colleague mentioned in an email, ‘zillions of postgrads’ during her years in Southampton, Birkbeck, Sussex, Edinburgh and finally at Oxford. Yet, everyone who had been mentored and occasionally even been mothered by her (and the list is long) felt a special connection: she was always there for them. One of her greatest qualities as a mentor was a unique mixture of humour and humility. She could disarm any anxieties you might have been going through with a self-deprecating anecdote from her own career. If you told her about the disappointing turnout at a talk you’d just given, for instance, she would immediately share with you the mortifying experience of arriving to deliver a lecture only to find that just one student had shown up, and then having to speak for an hour to her singular audience. It was a kind of self-deprecating wit which masked her sense of security and own scholarly brilliance but which reassured you that all academics went through similar difficulties and doubts. As the literature and music delegate for Oxford University Press for nearly a decade, Laura actively shaped their list: she would have read several hundred proposals and overseen the publication of scores of books. Recently, when one of us was organising an MSA conference panel and asked Laura if she might be interested in chairing it, it was no surprise that she instantly agreed to do so but it was pleasantly surprising to find out that she had in fact examined the PhD thesis of one of the panellists and served as the manuscript reader for the other’s book. Last month, when we decided to do a session on Woolf in her honour, we invited Emily Kopley, the author of Virginia Woolf and Poetry (2021), who promptly wrote back saying that it was Laura who had encouraged her to approach OUP with her book manuscript. When speaking to Laura about work in progress, you were always struck by both the range of her knowledge and the instinctive sense she had for whose research interests might chime with your own. Or what you might read. And, as Steve Connor notes in the Guardian obituary, ‘No draft chapter or book manuscript passed under Laura’s eyes without being improved, in a gentle manner that allowed writers to believe they had done it on their own.’ We used to co-convene the Modern and Contemporary Literature Research seminars at Oxford with Laura. She brought to the seminars many of the qualities that marked her scholarship – curiosity, erudition, astuteness, sympathy, but also an extraordinary ability to hear, respond to and engage with others. She had a compendious knowledge of the kinds of work being done by modernist scholars across the world and by graduate students in Oxford and an instinct for what would be the best match. She was a brilliant chair. But what she infused the seminars with is something far more difficult to convey – the word that returns is ‘loveliness’ – a certain generosity and acuteness that was as much emotional as it was intellectual. She was also tremendous fun: both funny and fun-loving, she knew how to let her hair down, and many of our finest moments with Laura came at conference drinks, raucous dinners or the pub afterwards. ‘If no one turns up in the seminars’, she told us before our first session together, ‘we would just have a good gossip’; more recently, during the pandemic, she reflected that ‘the hard work remains but all the loveliness has gone’. The figure who Laura returned to most frequently throughout her scholarship was Virginia Woolf, chapters about whom appear in Auto/biographical Discourses, The Tenth Muse, Dreams of Modernity and elsewhere, and whose work Laura transformed for generations of readers. Her criticism shed new light on Woolf’s work in relation to life-writing, film, feminist thought and psychoanalysis, among many other perspectives. This is without even mentioning Laura’s volume on Woolf for the ‘Writers and their Work’ series, which is one of the finest overviews of Woolf’s oeuvre and a model for how introductory studies should be written, of immense value to the first-year undergraduate and the academic reader alike. It felt especially fitting, therefore, that for Laura’s memorial event in October we should play a recording of her reading Woolf, from the ‘Time Passes’ section of To the Lighthouse; she had made the recording for New College in 2020 (and it can still be found on the college’s YouTube page).11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_jE6cxRm8E. In the middle section of To the Lighthouse, ‘Time Passes’, we see Woolf exploring the possibilities of a future or potential cinema, as imagined in ‘The Cinema’, using visual images to express emotions and to animate objects into non-human life. Sound is incorporated or ‘folded’ into silence (the silence of the cinema), while the unfolding of Mrs Ramsay’s shawl (a highly cinematic image, as the fold of the shawl swings to and fro) becomes an image of historical rupture. Mrs Ramsay, whose medium is light, appears after her death as in a film or slide-projection on a wall, and Woolf explores the play of light, the concept of memory as projection, and the corrosive effects of time on matter. The ten-year passage of time in the central section of To the Lighthouse is also the passing of one night, between the days of ‘The Window’ and ‘The Lighthouse’, from the midnight hour when the lights are extinguished to the breaking of dawn and of the veil on the sleeper’s eyes. During this interlude, the narrative oscillates between absolute stillness and the eruptions of nightmare, in which the world tosses and turns. Time is thus radically condensed (as the ten-year passage was itself a condensation of the period between the Victorian childhood of the 1880s and early 1890s and the return to the house after the end of World War I) or, in cinematic terms, speeded up. ‘Time Passes’ is also a dream-space, drawing upon the profound conceptual connections between dreams and cinema, and echoing Woolf’s reference in ‘The Cinema’ to the ‘dream architecture’ of a future film, in which the ‘cascades falling and fountains rising, which sometimes visits us in sleep or shapes itself in half-darkened rooms, could be realized before our waking eyes’. As in Vernon Lee’s discussions of motion, including her repeated returns in her study The Beautiful to the terms of the mountain rising, always rising, the appropriate tense, or mode, of movement and, in Woolf’s writings, of cinema, would appear to be the gerundive – ‘falling’ and ‘rising’, ‘falling’ and ‘rocking’. Woolf’s account of damaged and lost beauty in ‘Time Passes’ takes this form – ‘It seemed now as if, touched by human penitence and all its toil, divine goodness had parted the curtain and displayed behind it, single, distinct, the hare erect; the wave falling, the boat rocking, which, did we deserve them, should be ours always’. The image is closely echoed in the variant version of ‘The Cinema’: ‘the curtain parts and we behold, far off, some unknown and unexpected beauty’.22 Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 146–7. I’m honoured and moved to be asked to open this seminar, which is a wonderful thing for the faculty to be doing. And I’m not at all surprised by the number of participants and attendees. It strikes me that Laura continues to do, after her death, what she was renowned for doing during her life: bringing scholars together, making connections for us all. In Laura’s 2018 book on Autobiography for the OUP Very Short Introductions series, part of her life’s work on this subject, she gives a lucid and historically illuminating account of different kinds of autobiography, from confession to autofiction, and shows us with wonderful nuance and clarity the genre’s shifting, complex open-endedness, its ‘capacity to recreate itself’. She was planning to continue with that work on autobiography in another book, and I deeply wish I had had a chance to talk to her about those plans. In the VSI, she describes one historical phase of autobiography as the telling of ‘a unique, or important, or exemplary life’. The phrase rings home to me now as a way of talking about Laura herself. A unique, important, and exemplary life. That book on autobiography, which I greatly admire, means a lot to me, because it connects to the way our particular paths crossed, as Woolfians, as Goldsmiths’ Chairs, as authors of VSIs on life-writing, and as literature delegates to OUP. When Laura arrived in Oxford in 2010, she immediately, with the kind of generosity and openness that we all knew in her, agreed to join in the faculty’s undergraduate and graduate courses in life-writing, which we taught together for a while. I learnt an enormous amount from her in those classes; she changed my understanding about autobiography in relation to psychoanalysis and to film and photography. She also gave huge and unstinting support to the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, where she was especially enthusiastic about the principle of mixing up scholars and practitioners. I’ve lost count of the number of conversations we had about life-writing, the exam papers we marked together, the students we taught, and the DPhils we were involved with. Those working links between us are just a tiny sample of the connections and commitments Laura forged across the world with so many people and in so many institutions, where she was always utterly professional but never institutional. In all these areas of academic life, there was the same mixture of forensic rigour and humane sympathy, and the same grand level of integrity, warmth, responsibility, dedication – and fun. If you were her friend and colleague, you couldn’t resist her laughter and you would trust her with your life. Dear Charlotte – Possible texts for inclusion – Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (as well as his Camera Lucida); writings by W.G. Sebald (The Rings of Saturn would be a good starting point) which use photographs in extremely interesting ways. There is a useful chapter by Ian Christie on film and biography in the and Peter The of There is interesting feminist on visual and by is of and and by – visual as and have also of autobiography and the of the at the heart of their will or of photographs and their in memories and giving an image of the or even if this is only part of their you could on this of The or in the part of the could well be read as a of Woolf’s sense of and – of a culture, a a Woolf, in leaves us with which out something other than – but The of the which has a throughout the to this are And If we this as we are with a that out death, a and a she It was the out it The appeared on the This is the rhythm of the which not you so much for your kind I and about the and much to starting in I will be to but I this will wonderful not least the one you in your I would be to work with you on the and to about this field further at Oxford. I a idea to and having just read a number of for the this year, have some about further The to do and to be about the One for a psychoanalysis and to in psychoanalysis as in autobiographical using from and The of as James could come in as well as and so there would be a in reading for this The might the of and the and at the in which the of writers to their other and the in which they an image of ‘the writing Woolf, Barthes The from and will be held in the English on from It at the writing of biography and autobiography from a and closely at some and as the of the of autobiography, the use of and the writing of the writing of the of in to biography and autobiography in the and the relation between biography and how biography to the in autobiography, in the of the use of and and autobiographical and and students will be asked to one during the of the seminars, and will be to in word in and The first essay will be a and the essay will be a of your As well as the there will be in and to return and the Seminar and for the first essay will be at the first The will be examined by one word essay be by of for which you will your by of will have the to what you might to for your essay during the of the The essay but on used during the A number of graduate students may the but will not be giving or writing As part of the there will also be a number of on and by and which will place on at in Wolfson College, These are events and form part of the of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, but are for the of the students this who will have the to of the see the of the for on these should have read at least one biography and some of the texts on in the which are also to read some of the reading for before the of When Laura arrived at Southampton, her first academic in the early a with huge you could see immediately how she She was only in her early but she just knew things no one One how she could so much and be so about Whether it was a on life-writing, a on Virginia Woolf, psychoanalysis, the and the of the was always She was a wonderful with that and and whose a of to These qualities in she worked A of the of A she found for when the of us were Her was for friendship. The empathy of her friendship was She had a warmth and generosity that changed a when she was in A of that made a special A of friendship that gave to life. And giving is the central word She had a way of and then back in a form that was and and even when there was a of criticism in her The of friendship and the of wit and went She once said to me as I through the end of a book, have to a book to it and it to One of the I not is the and She had their by over to it work much of were of no and she and her gave up. their and had some time there was a at the It was the In their to the work they had We that her work on The of the Modern, is to be published by OUP. It is an book, from to from the to of rhythm and of It is a work that will be in and with her book on cinema, The Tenth She was also planning to return to in a new on as she was exploring the way they used criticism as a form of autobiography and I was to be Laura’s friend for nearly I not in that her death is as if a huge of has and into the – those images of where we see of falling for organising this memorial for for making it for us to come together to and to Laura This is a and to express our and It is a huge to be asked to speak at this memorial, but this is one of the and most I have I be and Laura’s academic and in the field of because that a and I of her to be to or in terms of a I you will the deeply of what I have to I it is to some some memories, that are at the of my I they something of Laura’s intellectual as well as the sheer of being in her presence as a but also as a I first Laura in the of after of to my about the of English at had any scholars working on and the then figure of I my for the chance of an for a PhD a I was by Laura and – a if there was one – and I was both and of how to be a I some about and about would a PhD on it be with Laura’s in the I also a lot of laughter in that first that was the of an about culture, but also about and friendship. Laura was so and by We will all have conference about Laura – Laura loved travel and academic – here are Laura and I on an October to on our own for with me for Laura of she to and her me how to at We were in a over the and the – modernist the time, Laura this modernist into the of modernist The first thing to about Laura in was her immense and at having the – Laura and never thought the When I she had been in a had over and was about the light and the of which, as those of us who have been there will are special in This was my first Sound Studies a new intellectual field to Laura was at in the and in all the She gave her ‘The of the Sound and then appeared as a chapter in and in Modern Literature and Edinburgh University Press, which taught us how to in film, and the of rhythm as a concept in and early twentieth-century intellectual laughter and in the before one of the best any of us had women at a one the a on her The whose we to be in emotional A the emotional of friendship. It is so to at the in the of Laura went of me, after at into a new and then returned to me she had found a I had to use in my She me into the to me It is a of a mixture of and brought to in the of the It was a brilliant I have used it many since when I work with to about how to the body the That was Laura’s to be as about your research and its as her her and just as when it came to your across those memories, those (and there are so many other so many other and the from through to the visual is just a tiny of Laura’s intellectual utterly brilliant and always always making with her time, her her and her kindness, funny – and irreverent – Laura. I was not of us were for the to I going to you more than I have the to all our with It is the

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