Abstract
Most of the respondents to Carolyn Heilbrun's “Guest Column: From Rereading to Reading” (119 [2004]: 211–17) seem generally to accept her rather dismal view of what is and is not possible in retirement. I disagree. Two of the fine scholars (and teachers) who were my dear friends and mentors did some of their best work in their eighties and nineties. One of these was John C. Pope, who was nearing ninety when those of us attending the Medieval Academy meeting agreed that his latest article on an Old English poem was the model of what a scholarly article ought to be; he had just mailed off another important contribution when he died, very suddenly, at ninety-three. Another was Ruth J. Dean, whose prizewinning masterwork, Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts, was published about three years before she died, at the age of one hundred.
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