Ramona Bressie

Bressie was born in Gilman, Illinois and raised in Joliet, the daughter of A. J. Bressie and Mae Melissa Moore Bressie. Her father was a railroad engineer who died in 1929.^[2][3] She had a sister, Lorna, who died in 1930.^[4] She graduated from University of Chicago in 1920,^[5] and earned a master's degree there in 1925. She completed doctoral studies there in 1928, under advisor Edith Rickert, with a dissertation on Thomas Rusk.^[6]

Bressie worked on the Chaucer Life-Records Project at the University of Chicago, with her mentor Edith Rickert and with John Matthews Manly, beginning in 1927.^[7] As an independent scholar, not a member of the university's faculty, she did original research,^[8][9] traveled to England, made maps,^[10] maintained lists and bibliographies, and wrote articles, often as a volunteer project helper, though sometimes with a small stipend or reimbursement for her expenses. For example, from 1933 to 1934, she held the Alice Freeman Palmer Fellowship from the American Association of University Women, for an ambitious bibliographic project.^[1]

After Manly and Rickert died in 1940 and 1938, respectively, the project passed into control of others at Chicago.^[11] Bressie had to fight for access to the work she had already contributed. She continued her research and writing on Chaucer, despite this exclusion, and despite her increasingly dire financial situation. In 1960, a cousin had her institutionalized as "mentally deranged"; she successfully argued for her sanity and was released after three months. She moved to England in 1964.^[1]