Obituary: Dr Elizabeth Heale (1946-2023)

It is with sadness that we report the recent passing of Elizabeth Heale, who was a member of the Department of English Literature and the Early Modern Research Centre for many years before she retired in 2008.

Elizabeth came to the University of Reading in 1972, having completed a PhD in the University of London. Her scholarly interests centred on Elizabethan poetry, and she made wide-ranging and important contributions to that field.

Throughout her career, she published articles on Shakespeare, Spenser, and Gascoigne, on women’s writing, on verse miscellanies, and on travel writing. In 1987, she published The Faerie Queene: A Reader’s Guide with Cambridge University Press. This well-regarded and much-cited work was reprinted twice and then went into a second edition in 1999. She spent a year as a visiting lecturer at the University of Illinois.

Elizabeth’s deep knowledge of Elizabethan lyric poetry led to the publication in 1998 of her second monograph: Wyatt, Surrey, and Early Tudor Poetry (London: Longman).

In the 1990s, Elizabeth became involved in efforts to recover early modern women’s writing and to understand the circumstances in which women’s literary production took place. She was a contributor to the Trinity/Trent colloquium on women’s writing (which ran alongside the Perdita Project) and contributed an essay to Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing. Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium, eds Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).

Elizabeth was alert to ambiguities in the self-presentation of Renaissance authors - caught between self-assertion and self-effacement - and brought her thoughts on this important subject together in Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse: Chronicles of the Self. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

Although Elizabeth formally retired from her position at Reading in 2008, she continued to be an active member of the research community, and she regularly gave papers at seminars and at the Early Modern Research Centre’s conferences. Elizabeth would publish The Devonshire Manuscript: A Women’s Book of Courtly Poetry (Toronto, Ont: Iter) in 2012.

Elizabeth was a dedicated teacher and a supportive colleague: she acted as Director of Teaching and Learning, and she designed and co-designed several modules (including ‘Renaissance Texts and Cultures’ and ‘Lyric Voices 1360-1650’) that have remained part of our undergraduate curriculum. She taught on the MA in ‘Texts in History, 1550-1700’ and she supervised several PhD theses to completion.

Elizabeth retired from the department in 2008 and moved from Reading to live in the Scottish Borders.

She is survived by her husband Graeme Watson, her daughters Beatrice and Tilda, and her grandchildren.

Written by Dr Mary Morrissey, Department of English Literature, University of Reading