In Memoriam

With this issue, we again mourn the passing of a journal mainstay. J. Hillis Miller passed away on 7 February 2021. He began his service as an SEL Editorial Board member in the summer of 1978, at the invitation of our Editor Emeritus, Robert L. Patten, a dear friend and occasional collaborator. The last essay Hillis evaluated favorably for us, published in our Autumn 2019 issue, was Hannah Fogarty’s “Touch, Consciousness, and Sympathy in Silas Marner.” Over the intervening forty-one years, Hillis was the primary evaluator for dozens of our accepted nineteenthcentury submissions. Looking back over his reports, I see virtually no time when he declined to read because he was too busy with other responsibilities. Few were more entitled to use that excuse than Hillis, but he did not. In those reports, I also see an unfailingly generous spirit of encouragement, even when they made critical points about a submission.

The many tributes that have appeared after his death all mention his many kindnesses to colleagues and students. I have one vivid memory of such an instance from the pre-Zoom era: a winner of SEL’s Monroe Kirk Spears Award was unable to attend the reception we hosted at the 2013 MLA conference in Boston to present the award and to honor other award winners. When we asked the winner, Lawrence Frank, to suggest a surrogate who planned to be at MLA to accept on his behalf, he said that it would mean the world to him if his mentor and friend, J. Hillis Miller, could do it. When Hillis was asked, he accepted immediately, but admitted later that he had traveled to Boston from his home in Maine just to accept the award for his friend, not to attend any other conference events. We are most grateful that Hillis’s lifelong commitment to scholarship and learning included his service and counsel for our journal and its editors. He will be sorely missed.

—Logan D. Browning, Publisher and Executive Editor