Laura Marcus 7 March 1956–22 September 2021

Laura Marcus in 2017 (photograph: John Cairns/The British Academy)

Laura Marcus, our loved colleague and friend, tragically died in September 2021, after a brief illness, so brief that we were all shocked and unprepared for this early death. She was at the height of her powers.

Laura had a thirty-year connection with Women: a cultural review. She became our Reviews Editor in 1990 and subsequently became one of the Editors. During this period she moved from Birkbeck, University of London, to the University of Sussex (1999), from there to the Regius Professorship at the University of Edinburgh (2007), and from Edinburgh to the Goldsmiths’ Professorship at Oxford (2010). She published some of her most renowned books during her time with Women: Autobiographical Discourses, Theory, Criticism, Practice (1994), a study of Virginia Woolf (1997), The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Literature (2004), The Tenth Muse (2007), which won the James Russell Lowell prize, and Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (2014). She had completed three quarters of a prodigiously learned and imaginative study of rhythm in modernity, Rhythm. The Measure of the Modern, which Oxford University will publish. It is a massive work, though there was still another quarter of the book planned before she died. Moving across science, psychobiology, experimental psychology, dance, philosophy, art history, poetics and the novel, it is a speculative work that explores the cultural centrality of rhythm for modernity. It is an extraordinary work of passionate scholarship. She once told me that she couldn’t help writing big books, even when they started as small studies. She developed a kind of thick description that becomes a phenomenology of the topic she explores. It’s a unique form of critical scholarship. She was planning to return to life-writing after this book. Her next study was to be about the way prominent modernist critics advancing theoretical analyses were also speaking of their own lives. It is so sad that we have lost another brilliant study.

Despite her increasingly august and powerful reputation, despite her massive workload (the Goldsmiths’ Professor is committed to work closely with Oxford University Press as well as to carrying out scholarly and university duties), Laura’s loyalty to Women’s project never wavered. She was always there, with her modesty and grace, for Editors’ meetings, always ready with imaginative suggestions for issues, always the first to volunteer readers for peer reviewing, always our close friend. She took on as much work as any of us: above all she was a shaping, creative presence.

Feminism was integrated into Laura’s scholarship. She simply took it for granted that gender is a category of criticism and all her work assimilates gender issues. It was actually quite rare for her to write separately on feminist themes—the article on ‘Woolf’s Feminisms and Feminism’s Woolf’ in the Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf edited by Sue Roe (2000), is one of these exceptions. But her knowledge of feminist work and her commitment to it was unparalleled, as we always discovered whenever there was a submission that was difficult to match with a peer reviewer. It was invariably Laura who made the right suggestion. More than this, her wisdom and insight—thoughtful, imaginative—was a constant spur to editorial policy. And because she was a born collaborator, because she actively enjoyed working as part of a group, our decisions were made collectively and harmoniously. This did not mean that she was simply a dulcet presence: she could be formidably rigorous when she disagreed with a decision or a view. Disagreeing with Laura was a real intellectual experience. And this was it—a disagreement was just that. There was no animus or ill humour.

Innately learned, imaginative and thoughtful, Laura’s was a unique presence. She had a lambent warmth and generosity that changed a room when she was in it. A gift of attentiveness and the art of friendship came naturally to her. She had a way of listening to someone’s ideas and handing them back enriched and deepened. Rigorous she could be, but she was also one of the wittiest and most humorous persons we knew. Delight, a sense of fun, was always with her. ‘You have to love a book enough to start writing it and hate it enough to want to finish it’.

Here are some accounts of Laura from her fellow editors.

Helen Carr: ‘Firstly, her wonderful laugh—so subversive, infectious, rich, deep, full of enjoyment of life. Then, her range of enthusiasms, from detective novels to ceramics—and how she lit up talking about them. And lastly her kindness. She was so lovely when Tony [Helen’s husband] died, so understanding’.

Alison Mark: ‘For a fundamentally serious person, Laura was never heavy, though she could be severe or acerbic, usually with the right of it, but what always comes to mind first is her laugh, rich and deep, and readily available. The first lecture I gave at Birkbeck was on Mrs Dalloway, standing in for Laura. I have always found the end of the novel intensely moving, and I told her I had had trouble getting to the end of it, which was that quotation. She said, “Where is the tenure for the lecturer who weeps?” with that characteristic pursing of her lips, and gave her laugh’.

Deryn Rees Jones: ‘The sadness has just kept coming in deep waves. Even though I knew Laura for thirty years I didn’t know her well in a daily, ordinary way. But she was a constant presence and support in my academic and intellectual life from when I was a postgrad at Birkbeck to when I joined the editorial team at ‘Women’. Even this week I was setting reading from Laura’s writing for students. She came to Liverpool a good few years ago to give, of course, a brilliant lecture for the postgrads at their conference; I remember very clearly how her face lit up when she talked about you [Isobel]: along with the laughter Alison mentioned, it was that quality she had of somehow suddenly being luminous.

I was trying to work out when I last saw her—I had thought it was at one of our Women London lunches. But I think in fact the last time was in Oxford gossiping in the pub after viva-ing one of her Ph.D. students.

We were feeling our way last night to put things into words, as you said. But this morning what I have is a huge sense of Laura’s energy and how easily, somehow, she carried that capacity to do and think things quickly … and be so alert and efficient. But also I’m remembering that incredible way in which she would move from saying something serious and engaging and then almost out of the blue shift into playfulness with a smile and an impish look'.

‘I saw a tweet from Jo Winning yesterday about how Laura asked her if she was a book what book she would be: Laura’s answer was “To the Lighthouse”; that feels very poignant and so right, this evening writing this’. Our sense of loss grows through time. We know the huge scholarly world to which she belonged, in mourning for her just now, will increasingly come to understand even more intensely the profundity of her loss as time passes. She will never be forgotten.