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

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 put contemporary 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. Christina von Nolcken is Associate Professor Emerita at the University of Chicago, USA.