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  • Katherine Mary Bryden (1953–2015)

The premature death from cancer of Mary Bryden in St Wilfrid’s Hospice, Eastbourne, on 5 November 2015, is a sad loss to the academic community, as well as to Mary’s family and her many friends. Mary was a scholar of international reputation, and a personality who charmed all who met her; she was generous with her knowledge and her time, kind, enthusiastic, straightforward, warm and witty, modest and unassuming, and full of fun.

Mary was born on 9 September 1953 into a caring and close-knit family, and she enjoyed a happy childhood, including her school days at Eastbourne High School for Girls. She entered the University of Reading in 1971 to read French and English, and graduated in 1975 with a BA (Hons) in French Studies. After taking her Master’s degree at Salford University (1980–82), she returned to Reading in 1987 to study with Jim Knowlson for her PhD on the prose and drama of Samuel Beckett.

Before beginning her university career, Mary had spent some time lecturing in French at Tameside College of Technology, and working in administration at Salford University, and then Aston University. She made a welcome return to the Department of French Studies at the University of Reading in 1990 as Beckett Research Fellow. She became a Lecturer in 1993, and Senior Lecturer in 1997. In 2002, she took up a Chair in European Literature at the University of Cardiff; then in 2007, she returned to Reading as Professor of French. Mary was a popular teacher, engaging with areas across the curriculum, from first-year language to literature from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, but having a special interest in the translation of literature, gender theory, and of course the writings of Samuel Beckett. She took her full share of administrative duties, including leadership roles as Head of the Department of Modern Languages and European Studies, and School Director of Research. She was a member of the Executive of the Society for French Studies, elected in 1998; she was President of the Association of University Professors and Heads of French (2010–13), and subsequently Vice-President. From 2006 to 2014, Mary was a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College. She held visiting appointments at Newnham College, Cambridge, and Magdalen College, Oxford.

It is for her research contributions, especially to Beckett Studies, that Mary will always be best known. In 1993 she became Associate Director of the Beckett International Foundation, and in 1995, Joint Director with John Pilling, extending her characteristic warm welcome to Beckett scholars from across the globe. In 1997 she was elected to the Board of the Samuel Beckett Society, and later became President of the international Samuel Beckett Society (2003–05). She wrote two [End Page 310] monographs on Beckett. Women in Samuel Beckett’s Prose and Drama: Her Own Other (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993) brought the preoccupations of feminist theory into the mainstream of Beckett criticism. As early as 1988, she had raised the issue of ‘Beckett and the Matter of Gender’ at a Beckett Research Seminar in the University of Reading. Her book, based on her PhD thesis, was a groundbreaking account of the changing images of the feminine in Beckett’s work. She traced a careful trajectory: initially, the women in his prose are perceived as objects constructed by the sharp and antagonistic contrasts of masculine desire and disgust that are the markers of that time; more sympathetically, in his drama, female figures display a stunted, limited subjectivity, in their belated recognition of their inability to speak and live for themselves; in his later work, gender oppositions are replaced by sexual indeterminacy. Mary was one of the earliest to break wide open the issue of gender positions in Beckett’s work, drawing on the work of Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Deleuze and Guattari, which she explored and explained with a clarity few have equalled.

Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998) examines the dialogue that Beckett’s thinking and writing pursue with the multiple discourses, practices, and beliefs of Christian religious experience, and the recognition of the ‘cultural reality...

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