Alice Walker (8 December 1900 – 14 October 1982) was a British scholar of the

Elizabethan The Elizabethan era is the epoch in the Tudor period of the history of England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603). Historians often depict it as the golden age in English history. The symbol of Britannia (a female personif ...

and Jacobean writer

Thomas Lodge Thomas Lodge (c. 1558September 1625) was an English writer and medical practitioner whose life spanned the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Biography Thomas Lodge was born about 1558 in West Ham, the second son of Sir Thomas Lodge, ...

and the poet and playwright

William Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's natio ...

Life

Walker was born in 1900 in

Crumpsall Crumpsall is an outer suburb and electoral ward of Manchester, England, north of Manchester city centre, bordered by Cheetham Hill, Blackley, Harpurhey, Broughton, and Prestwich. The population at the 2011 census was 15,959. Historically p ...

in Manchester. Her parents were George Edward and Mary Alice Walker. She went to school at Blackburn High School for Girls. She did well at

Royal Holloway College Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL), formally incorporated as Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, is a public research university and a constituent college of the federal University of London. It has six schools, 21 academic departm ...

graduating in 1923 and three years later she gained her doctorate for her thesis on the Elizabethan and Jacobean writer

. She decided that she should write a four volume description of Lodge's works and obtained a Jex-Blake scholarship. She travelled for a year before beginning three years of lecturing at the

Royal Holloway Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL), formally incorporated as Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, is a public university, public research university and a constituent college of the federal University of London. It has six schools, ...

from 1928 to 1931 and then she does not appear to have taken paid work until she became a librarian in 1939. In 1933 she published ''The Life of Thomas Lodge'' again about this physician and writer of the sixteenth century. She became an expert on the works of

publishing editions of his work. She was known for saying that there would never be a definitive version of his work unless a law was passed to decide it. Walker died at Plymouth Hospital in 1982.

Works

* ''Life of Thomas Lodge'', 1933 * ''The Arte of English Poesie'', with Gladys Doidge Willcock, 1934 * ''Edward Capell and his edition of Shakespeare'', 1960 * ''Othello'' * ''Textual problems of the First Folio Richard III, King Lear, Troilus & Cressida, 2 Henry IV, Hamlet, Othello'' * ''Troilus and Cressida'' * ''The Two Gentlemen of Verona: a concordance to the text of the first folio works''

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Walker, Alice 1900 births 1982 deaths People from Crumpsall English librarians British women librarians British librarians Alumni of Royal Holloway, University of London 20th-century English women writers 20th-century English writers 20th-century British historians English women non-fiction writers English literary historians Women literary historians British women historians