RCRO NL 3.2 Agnes Lathan

The news of the death, last January, of Miss Agnes Mary Christabel Latham will have come as a surprise to many of her admirers worldwide. This surely could not be the editor of The Poems of Sir Walter Raleigh, first published as long ago as 1929, with later reprints, and still not superseded. It was indeed, for Agnes Latham died in Pickering, Yorkshire, only a few weeks short of her 91st birthday, and her magnum opus was published when she was only 24. It was a work of mature and incisive scholarship, and although some of the poems she included have since been attributed to other authors, she shrewdly disarmed potential critics by noting her own reservations. Her sketch of Raleigh's life which forms part of her introduction si still worth reading, especially for its style. It demonstrates, too, not only her understanding of that "lonely and enigmatic figure" but also that she shared to the full Sir Walter's own "quickening spirit."

Agnes Latham was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, and remained a loyal Yorkshire woman all her life. On her mother's side she came from a long line of well known organ-builders. After attending school in her native town she proceeded to Oxford where she read English Literature at Somerville College. She took her degree with first class honors in 1926 and plunged at once into research on the great Elizabethan whose multifarious career was to occupy her, to the virtual exclusion, except for Shakespeare, of all other writers, to the end of her working life. For most of the 1930s and until the end of World War II, so few were the opportunities then open to women in the universities, she embraced librarianship and teaching in technical schools. A trickle of papers appeared in learned journals, largely on ostensibly literary themes, but more and more she bestrode the two disciplines of literature and history and embarked on the preparation of an edition of Raleigh's surviving letters to replace the Edward Edwards' volumes published as long ago as 1868.

In 1946 Miss Latham was appointed to a lectureship at Bedford College in the University of London, becoming Reader in English Literature in 1958, a post she held until her retirement in 1975. With greater accessibility to libraries and record sources in London, and in particular to the magnificent manuscript collection left by William, Lord Burghley, and Sir Robert Cecil, later earl of Salisbury, at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, work on finding and editing Raleigh's letters proceeded, slowly but surely, as befitted one of her generation for whom research had to give way to, but at the same time always enriched, the teaching of undergraduates. Recruitment in the early 1970s to the small Anglo-American team assembled by Professor Pierre Lefranc of

Laval University, Quebec, with the aim of publishing the whole of Raleigh's works, brought fresh encouragement and resources undreamed of in Miss Latham's own academic community, enabling her to add considerably to her own collection, especially of hitherto unpublished letters. Being the scholar she was, each new find, and indeed all the old Edwards texts relied upon by generation after generation of biographers, was subjected by Miss Latham to every kind of scrutiny, paleographical, linguistic, literary and historical. All her transcripts and her extensive historical and textual annotation were written in the clear and stylish hand which so delighted her correspondents to the very end of her life. Among her new friends in the international circle of

Raleigh scholars, none found more delight in her company than David and the late Allison Quinn.

Advancing years and retirement to the Yorkshire moors which distanced her from academic libraries, coupled with the collapse of the Canadian project, finally brought her work on the letters to a virtual halt. All the really hard work had been done. All that was needed was its setting up in a form suitable for publication, a task which Miss Latham gratefully entrusted to a colleague recently retired from the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Exeter (and, incidentally, a Devonian). The new edition of Sir Walter Raleigh's letters will be published in a year or so's time by the University of Exeter Press, perhaps appropriately in the county of his birth and wherein he himself would fain have made his home and laid his bones.