Mitzi Myers
American literary scholar (1939-2001)
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Mitzi Ouida Myers[1] (October 9, 1939 – November 5, 2001) was an American literary scholar. A 1990 Guggenheim Fellow, she specialized in children's literature and Georgian era women authors. She worked as a professor and lecturer at University of California, Santa Barbara and California State University, before settling at University of California, Los Angeles.
October 9, 1939
Mitzi Myers | |
|---|---|
| Born | Mitzi Ouida Myers October 9, 1939 Sulphur Springs, Texas, U.S. |
| Died | November 5, 2001 (aged 62) Anaheim Hills, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Literary scholar |
| Spouse |
Dennis Allen Hengeveld
(m. 1967; died 1983) |
| Awards | Guggenheim Fellowship (1990) |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | |
| Thesis | Aspects of William Godwin's reputation in the 1790's (1969) |
| Carroll Camden | |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline |
|
| Institutions | |
Biography
Early life and academic career
Myers was born on October 9, 1939, in Sulphur Springs, Texas.[2] As a young child, she was "a lover of reading and of books".[3] She obtained her BA (1961) and MA (1962) at East Texas State College and worked as a teaching assistant at Rice University, before obtaining her PhD there in 1969.[4][3] Her doctoral dissertation Aspects of William Godwin's reputation in the 1790's was supervised by Carroll Camden.[5]
Originally an assistant professor at University of California, Santa Barbara from 1966 to 1973, Myers later started working at California State University in 1974.[4] She worked as a lecturer at the Cal Poly branches in San Bernardino (1974-1977), Fullerton (1976-1977), Pomona (1978-1980; 1982-1988), and Long Beach (1982-1983).[4] In 1980, she began working as a lecturer at University of California, Los Angeles,[4] remaining with the college for the next two decades.[6] She taught courses focused on the history of children's literature and young adult literature, as well as writing courses.[2][3] Her work at UCLA also included basic writing undergraduate curriculum development and contribution to the Children's Book Collection.[6] She also taught at Chapman University and Scripps College.[3] She was a 1986-1987 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow.[3]
Scholarly career
Having become interested in the field while at Rice, Myers specialized in children's literature as a scholar.[6] Her status as a children's literature expert was widely recognized throughout the world,[2][6] and Naomi Wood said that Myers was "unquestionably the founding mother of eighteenth-century children's literature criticism".[7] Her contributions to children's literature studies included extending the start of children's literature beyond the 1865 publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; encouraging the study of book copy defacements as "the hidden history of childhood"; editing The Norton Anthology of Children's Literature: The Traditions in English; and making contributions to the Cambridge Companion to Children's Literature and Encyclopedia Americana.[6][2]
Myers also studied Georgian era women authors like Maria Edgeworth, Hannah More, and Mary Wollstonecraft, and considered Edgeworth her favorite.[6][8] She won the 1988 Children's Literature Association Best Critical Essay Award for her 1986 essay "Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Female Tradition in Georgian Children's Books".[3] In 1990, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship[9] to research Edgeworth's work.[4]
Personal life
On March 14, 1967, Myers married Dennis Allen Hengeveld, a contemporary from Rice who later became an English professor at Cal State Fullerton.[10][6] They were married until his death on May 10, 1983.[10] She also had a brother, whom she survived, as well as a sister who outlived her.[8]
Myers reportedly "delighted in silver jewelry, fast driving, and an absolute accuracy of annotation".[8] She reportedly called herself the "grand old queen of the footnote".[2]
Death and legacy
On August 13, 2000, Myers's house in Fullerton, California, was damaged in a fire.[3] Her four Edgeworth manuscripts in progress at the time – two academic books and two novel annotated versions – were lost in the fire, as was the majority of her personal library of 35,000 volumes, reportedly including rare books and "nearly all of them annotated".[6] Myers, whose sister Patsy told the Los Angeles Times that the books "were like children to her", repeatedly reentered the burning house in an attempt to save the books, suffering second- and third-degree burns and pneumonia as a result.[6] She went on medical leave afterwards and temporarily moved to Anaheim Hills, where she died on November 5, 2001, due to complications from the pneumonia, aged 62.[2]
The Lion and the Unicorn called Myers "one of her generation's most far-ranging and rigorous scholars" in an obituary for her.[8] She had a festschrift, Culturing the Child, 1690–1914, released in 2005 and edited by Donelle Ruwe.[11][7]