Barbara Reynolds

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This article is about the English author and reader in Italian Studies. For the African American author and journalist, see Barbara Ann Reynolds.
Cover of Reynold's 1993 biography of Dorothy L. Sayers
Cover of Reynold's 1993 biography of Dorothy L. Sayers

Barbara Reynolds (born 13 June 1914) is an English scholar, lexicographer and translator, wife of the philologist and translator Lewis Thorpe.

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[edit] Early life

The daughter of Alfred Charles Reynolds, and the god-daughter of Dorothy L. Sayers, Reynolds was educated at St Paul's Girls' School and University College, London.[1]

[edit] Career

Reynolds was an assistant lecturer in Italian at the London School of Economics from 1937 to 1940.[1] During the Second World War, she was an assistant lecturer (1940–1945) at the University of Cambridge, then University Lecturer in Italian Literature and Language from 1945 to 1962.[1] She was Warden of Willoughby Hall, University of Nottingham, from 1963 to 1969 and Reader in Italian Studies at Nottingham from 1966 to 1978.[1] Alongside her teaching work, she was chief executive and General Editor of the Cambridge Italian Dictionary from 1948 to 1981 and managing editor of Seven, an Anglo-American literary review, from 1980 to 2004.[1]

Reynolds held the title of Honorary Reader in Italian at the University of Warwick from 1975 to 1980 and was Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, 1974–75, Wheaton College, Illinois, 1977–78, and 1982, Trinity College, Dublin, 1980 and 1981, and Hope College, Michigan, 1982.[1]

[edit] Major publications

Her major work is the Cambridge Italian Dictionary, of which she was General Editor. The first volume appeared in 1962 and the second in 1981.

Beyond the Dictionary, her first book was a study of Alessandro Manzoni.

She completed and annotated Paradiso, the last volume of Dorothy L. Sayers' three-volume translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, which was left unfinished at Dorothy Sayers' death. Reynolds afterwards translated Dante's La Vita Nuova and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso for the Penguin Classics. She has written a study of Dante's life and work, Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man.

In 1993, Reynolds published a biography of Sayers, who was her god-mother, called Dorothy L. Sayers: Her life and soul (1993). She has since edited four volumes of Sayers's letters and an additional volume.

[edit] Bibliography

  • Reynolds, Barbara (2006), Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man (I.B. Tauris)
  • Reynolds, Barbara, Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993; rev. eds 1998, 2002) ISBN 0-340-72845-0

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ a b c d e f REYNOLDS, Barbara at Who's Who online (accessed 26 November 2007)