Alison Fairlie

Alison Anna Bowie Fairlie
Born 23 May 1917
Lerwick
Died 21 February 1993
Cambridge
Nationality British

Professor Alison Fairlie FBA (23 May 1917 – 21 February 1993) was a British scholar of French literature. She was a long time fellow of Girton College.

Life

Alison Anna Bowie Fairlie was born in Lerwick on the island of Shetland.[1] Her father had been the Presbyterian minister in Lerwick but he died when she was young. Fairlie went to St Hugh's College in Oxford in 1935 and left with a first class degree in Modern and Medieval Languages.[2] By the time she obtained her DPhil it was 1943 and Fairlie had been recruited to work at Bletchley Park which was Britain's centre for deciphering intercepted German wartime messages. She was employed as an assistant of the Foreign Office, but she was assigned to work in a section led by Vivienne Alford. The work involved trying to understand unusual phrases discovered in messages. These phrases may have been associated with technical descriptions and Fairlie had to quickly extend her knowledge to matters outside literature and history. Leonard Wilson Forster who worked at Bletchley described how Fairlie's research techniques which she had used for her doctorate were strangely still relevant as they tried to understand the German, Italian and Japanese technical jargon.[3] The group was said to be inspired by the polymath Geoffrey Tandy.[3]

Obviously the occupation of France interfered with what might have been her base for post doctoral work. She had returned to work in Paris until it fell to the advancing German armies in 1940. Fairlie made her way to Bordeaux where she saw many diplomats abandoning their expensive cars. She did not have diplomatic credentials but they managed to persuade a Dutch grain ship to take them to England.[4] Her first book was titled Leconte de Lisle's Poems on the Barbarian Races and it was published in 1947. This book was an edited version of her doctoral thesis.

Fairlie died in Cambridge in 1993.[1]

References

  1. 1 2 Malcolm Bowie, ‘Fairlie, Alison Anna Bowie (1917–1993)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 11 Oct 2015
  2. ↑ Obituary: Professor Alison Fairlie, The Independent, Retrieved 11 October 2015
  3. 1 2 Alison Fairlie, Extract from Proceedings of the British Academy obituary by Malcolm Bowie FBA (PBA 84, 285-287)
  4. ↑ Alison Fairlie, British Association, 1993


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