Mildred Pope

That’s a portrait of Mildred Katherine Pope (1872-1956).

There are periods of history in which, for certain people, all the doors they would most want to pass through are closed, locked, and barred, and nothing can be done about that. Then there are periods when all those doors are wide open. But there are also the periods in between, when the doors are locked but can, just maybe, be unlocked; closed but capable of being opened by those who are bold and resourceful, patient and determined. Indeed, those specially gifted people are the ones who ensure that the doors will be open for those who come after them.

I’ve been reading about Mildred Pope — who was one such person, and to an exceptional degree — because she was Dorothy Sayers’s tutor at Oxford, and the model for the character of Miss Lydgate in Gaudy Night.

Miss Lydgate’s manner was exactly what it had always been. To the innocent and candid eyes of that great scholar, no moral problem seemed ever to present itself. Of a scrupulous personal integrity, she embraced the irregularities of other people in a wide, unquestioning charity. As any student of literature must, she knew all the sins of the world by name, but it was doubtful whether she recognized them when she met them in real life. It was as though a misdemeanor committed by a person she knew was disarmed and disinfected by the contact. So many young people had passed through her hands, and she had found so much good in all of them; it was impossible to think that they could be deliberately wicked, like Richard III or Iago. Unhappy, yes; misguided, yes; exposed to difficult and complicated temptations which Miss Lydgate herself had been mercifully spared, yes. If she heard of a theft, a divorce, even worse things, she would knit puzzled brows and think how utterly wretched the offenders must have been before they could do so dreadful a thing. Only once had Harriet ever heard her speak with unqualified disapproval of anyone she knew, and that was of a former pupil of her own who had written a popular book about Carlyle. “No research at all,” had been Miss Lydgate’s verdict, “and no effort at critical judgment. She has reproduced all the old gossip without troubling to verify anything. Slipshod, showy, and catchpenny. I am really ashamed of her.” And even then she had added: “But I believe, poor thing, she is very hard up.”

This is a wonderful tribute, but the back story, as it were, of Mildred Pope is a truly remarkable one. Her DNB entry is brief but eye-opening, and much of what I know comes from it.

She came up to Oxford to study at Somerville in 1891 and stayed for most of her life, first as a librarian, then as a tutor. But though her undergraduate experience had many high points — especially in her performances in field hockey and disputation: she was “renowned for her pace on the wing … and her level-headedness in debate” — her academic career was somewhat rockier, because there was not one scholar at Oxford who could instruct her in the subject she loved: Old French philology. Essentially, her education in the field which she would make her own was achieved through an extended exchange of letters with Paget Toynbee of Cambridge — whose intellectual roots were in Old French but who had become, by the time he knew Mildred Pope, England’s finest scholar of Dante.

Miss Pope (as her students later called her) seems to have been deterred by nothing, taking her First and then going on to study philology at Heidelberg before returning to Somerville. Later she was awarded some sabbatical time to pursue her doctorate at the University of Paris under the guidance of the legendary medievalist and philologist Gaston Paris. She received her doctorate in 1903, though Oxford did not see fit to award her a B.A. until 1920, when other female graduates were so acknowledged — she would receive hers alongside Sayers.

No matter. When she died the Times of London reported that the establishment and development of the teaching of medieval French at Oxford was almost wholly her doing. Further, “It would be fair to say that Pope effectively invented the discipline of Anglo-Norman studies.” Her recruitment of other dons to the cause of women’s suffrage in the 1910s was severely frowned upon by the university authorities; she was impervious to intimidation. Throughout the Great War she devoted her summers to intense and demanding relief work among refugees and displaced persons in France and Belgium. In 1928 she became the first woman to be appointed Reader at Oxford.

She was, a historian reported, “the most beloved of all Somerville’s tutors,” and when she left the College in 1934 — to accept a professorship at the University of Manchester — a Gaudy in her honor was held. Sayers was asked to offer a tribute, and she did, calling particular attention to Pope’s “integrity of judgement” and “humility in the face of facts.” Above all, Sayers said, Mildred Pope exemplified “the generosity of a great mind … that will not be contented with the second-hand or second-best.”

Here’s to the great Mildred Pope.