In Memoriam Mitzi Myers (1939-2001)

Abstract

News that Mitzi Myers, the distinguished UCLA scholar and teacher, had died at home November 5, 2001, came as a shock to many, who had only then heard the tragic story of how, fifteen months before, a fire had destroyed her home and extensive library. The colleagues who posted tributes to Myers on the major list-serves for children's literature and eighteenth-century studies attested to her influence when they expressed dismay at the premature loss of one of her generation's most far-ranging and rigorous scholars. First and foremost a student of the late eighteenth century, Mitzi's command of the texts, cultural context, and literary theory relating to her areas of interest was unparalleled. After finishing her dissertation on the philosopher William Godwin, she began studying Mary Wollstonecraft, which led her to reconsider the literary importance of other Georgian women writers such as Sarah Fielding, Hannah More, Lady Fenn, Mrs. Barbauld, and Sarah Trimmer, whose works had been largely neglected. In spirited polemic essays published in a wide variety of journals and monographs, Mitzi defended the contributions of those late Enlightenment "impeccable governesses, rational dames, and moral mothers" by recontextualizing their works. When she demonstrated that they were hardly as unreadable, unenjoyable, or insignificant as their detractors had insisted, she challenged the prevalent Whiggish view that insisted on a movement from dry, colorless instruction to the open-ended delights of fantasy. Of all the women writers whose reputations Mitzi recovered, Maria Edgeworth was her favorite. Some of Mitzi's finest essays argued for Edgeworth's readmission to the canon: the "wee-wee stories" for young readers were central to Edgeworth's achievement, which Mitzi brilliantly revalidated by demonstrating their rich allusiveness, autobiographical underpinnings, their engagement with contemporary sociopolitical debates, and their shrewd but sympathetic awareness of actual children's psychology, language, and behavior.