The "Lives" and Writings of Edith Rickert (1871-1938) von Christina von Nolcken | Novelist, Cryptologist, and World-Class Chaucerian | ISBN 9783031532641

The "Lives" and Writings of Edith Rickert (1871-1938)

Novelist, Cryptologist, and World-Class Chaucerian

von Christina von Nolcken
Buchcover The "Lives" and Writings of Edith Rickert (1871-1938) | Christina von Nolcken | EAN 9783031532641 | ISBN 3-031-53264-3 | ISBN 978-3-031-53264-1

The "Lives" and Writings of Edith Rickert (1871-1938)

Novelist, Cryptologist, and World-Class Chaucerian

von Christina von Nolcken

This biography represents a nuanced account of Edith Rickert’s life—and inner life. It follows Rickert’s own writing and draws attention to her life as a writer. Rickert has been long remembered as a medievalist, but she also contributed to American scholarship, pedagogy, and codicology. Born into a family of very modest means in Canal Dover, Ohio, she numbered among the University of Chicago’s earliest doctoral students (1895-1899) and was among the first eight women to reach the top of that University's professorial ladder. She prepared what remains the definitive edition of the medieval romance  Emaré . She documented aspects of the medieval, as well as Chaucer’s life, with a historian’s accuracy and a novelist’s insight. In the  Ladies Home Journal  she wrote on women's issues that remain pressing today. With University of Chicago professor John Matthews Manly (1865-1940), she prepared numerous readers and textbooks, including several that helped putcontemporary British and American literature on the academic map. Again in collaboration with Manly, she was responsible for what has been described as “perhaps the most important of the MI-8 solutions” during World War I, as well as the eight-volume edition of Chaucer's  Canterbury Tales  (1940). Rickert also published short stories, novels, poems, and essays. As this biography shows, Rickert's achievement as a writer was equal to her work as a literary critic.