Grundy, Isobel 1938–

PERSONAL: Born May 23, 1938, in Weybridge, Surrey, England; daughter of Gerald Charles Nash (a headmaster) and Nora Isobel Grundy. Ethnicity: "Caucasian." Education: St. Anne's College, Oxford, B.A. (with first class honors), 1960, D.Phil., 1971. Hobbies and other interests: Walking, swimming, reading, theater, gardening, music.

ADDRESSES: Office—c/o Department of English, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E5, Canada. E-mail—isobel.grundy@ualberta.ca.

CAREER: Teacher of English as a second language at secondary school in Jämsänkoski, Finland, 1960–61; J.M. Dent Publishers, London, England, worked in editorial department, 1961–63; Columbia University, New York, NY, research assistant to Professor Robert Halsband, 1963–66; University of London, Queen Mary College (now Queen Mary and Westfield College), London, began as lecturer, became reader in English and department head, between 1971 and 1990; University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Henry Marshall Tory Professor, 1990–2003, professor emeritus, 2003–. Chawton House, Hampshire, England, trustee for library.

MEMBER: Jane Austen Society of North America, Royal Society of Canada (fellow), Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

AWARDS, HONORS: Member of Honour of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2006; Award for Outstanding Achievement (won jointly with Susan Brown and Patricia Clements), Computing in the Arts and Humanities, Society for Digital Humanities/Societe pour l'etude des medias interactifs.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Robert Halsband) Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Essays and Poems and Simplicity, a Comedy, Clarendon Press (Oxford, England), 1977, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1993.

(Editor, with Patricia Clements) Virginia Woolf: New Critical Essays, Barnes & Noble (Totowa, NJ), 1983.

(Editor and contributor) Samuel Johnson: New Critical Essays, Barnes & Noble (Totowa, NJ), 1984.

Samuel Johnson and the Scale of Greatness, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1986.

(With Virginia Blain and Patricia Clements) The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1990.

(Editor, with Susan Wiseman) Women, Writing, History: 1640–1740, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1992.

(Editor) Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Romance Writings, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1996.

(Editor) Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Selected Letters, Penguin (New York, NY), 1997.

(Editor) Eliza Fenwick, Secresy, or the Ruin on the Rock, Broadview (Peterborough, Ontario, Canada), 1998.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment, Clarendon Press (New York, NY), 1999.

Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginning to the Present (electronic text), Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2006.

General editor of the book series "Eighteenth-Century Novels by Women," University Press of Kentucky.

SIDELIGHTS: Two people who Isobel Grundy has repeatedly addressed in her writings are Samuel Johnson and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. "We are indebted … to Isobel Grundy for presenting us with Lady Mary's writings. Over many years, Grundy has edited Mary Wortley Montagu's essays, poems, plays and fiction—most of which existed only in manuscript until very recently," recognized Margaret Anne Doody in a Times Literary Supplement review of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment. She wrote: "The work that has gone into this biography is impressive…. Grundy's mass of well-arranged information inspires confidence, even if at times we may wish for more than the abundant facts."

In earlier works, Grundy focused on another writer who sustained her attention—Samuel Johnson. Samuel Johnson: New Critical Essays "is a lively and genial book which does not overstay its welcome," observed Lawrence Lipking in his Eighteenth-Century Studies essay, including the volume among the better publications on "Johnson scholarship" produced for the two-hundred year anniversary of Johnson's death. Lipking summarized: "The essays tend to be brief and pointed; they explore some relatively unfamiliar territory … and on the whole they successfully negotiate the particular trick of … appealing both to specialists and general readers by mixing twice-told anecdotes with bits of fresh erudition…. Several of the essays offer original ideas or perspectives." The essay singled out as perhaps the best of the book's nine selections is Grundy's text, which Lipking refers to as "a shrewd piece on Johnson's maxims, which serve to explore rather than foreclose issues." Of Grundy's contribution to Samuel Johnson, David Nokes stated in the Times Literary Supplement: "In an elegant essay which does justice to its subject, she analyses Johnson's style in terms of process rather than precept. In her view, Johnson interrogates and explores the 'truths universally acknowledged' with which his works abound, and essays which open with a resounding tutti often concluded with more tentative solo." Choice reviewer G. Scholtz also felt "Grundy's careful analysis of Johnson's use of aphorism" to be the collection's forerunner. Scholtz wrote that Samuel Johnson is "an enlightening, interesting, and readable" book but "does not quite possess the distinction of its predecessors."

Grundy expanded her analysis of Johnson in Samuel Johnson and the Scale of Greatness. "Scholars and advanced students will find it provocative and illuminating," according to A.E. Jones, Jr., in a Choice review that noted Grundy's perspective of "Johnson's bifocal approach." Modern Language Review contributor Leopold Damrosch, Jr., specified that Samuel Johnson and the Scale of Greatness is primarily focused on "some familiar ambiguities in Johnson, which might even be called contradictions." "Johnson is highly ambivalent … and it is this ambivalence that Dr. Grundy examines in close (sometimes exhausting) detail," stated Damrosch. Rather than using "a single scale," explained Damrosch, Johnson "ponders the different conclusions that are suggested by the uses of a variety of scales." "For Johnson and Grundy … there are always at least two possibilities," commented Lipking, while praising Grundy in his Eighteenth-Century Studies essay for "appreciat[ing] the suppleness of his intelligence, its many twists and turns."

Grundy's use in Samuel Johnson and the Scale of Greatness of "the imagery of competing scales or double vision, so favored by Johnson himself, helps to show the underlying logic of many seeming inconsistencies," commented Lipking. "Grundy prefers to take short views of her author and to describe his customary habits of mind and composition," analyzed Lipking. "This is worth doing, and she does it well. But it tends to reduce Johnson's work to a set of procedures," Lipking continued. "The quality that stands out in this book … is assiduity," reported Lipking, noting that "sometimes, perhaps, she tries to see more than is there. Not all the readings in this book seem convincing, and at times they can be quite tendentious." "Yet," qualified Lipking, "even when Grundy pushes her thesis too hard, she does compel the reader to look very closely at the texts she analyzes and to notice their deft command of shades of meaning." Samuel Johnson and the Scale of Greatness is "a patient, thoughtful, and good-humoured exploration of some aspects of Johnson's thought…. [that] may not greatly alter our understanding of Johnson, but … does extend and enrich it," wrote Damrosch.

Grundy told CA: "Writing for an electronic text, for Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginning to the Present, has been like learning to read and write all over again, from scratch. This text, which is available online by subscription from Cambridge University Press, consists of detailed entries on individual writers (most, though not all, British women writers) and of contextual historical material, both political and cultural. It is deeply encoded, marked up with tags which the writers add as they compose. Users can therefore not only pull out mentions of specific names, organization names, places, or titles, but can also pull out excerpts which deal with life experience (non-literary employment, or political activity, or travel, or women's health issues, or whatever) or with literary issues (relations with publishers, serialization, intertextuality, imagery, reviews, and literally dozens more). This is like adding an extra dimension to one's writing, perhaps a little bit like moving from painting to sculpture. Learning to do it has been an astonishing experience, unavailable to any generation before the generations active now."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Choice, June, 1985, G. Scholtz, review of Samuel Johnson: New Critical Essays, p. 1496; December, 1986, A.E. Jones, Jr., review of Samuel Johnson and the Scale of Greatness, p. 624.

Eighteenth-Century Studies, fall, 1987, Lawrence Lipking, review of Samuel Johnson and the Scale of Greatness, pp. 109-113; spring, 1995, Melinda Alliker Rabb, review of Women, Writing, History: 1640–1740, pp. 349-351.

Modern Language Review, October, 1988, Leopold Damrosch, Jr., review of Samuel Johnson and the Scale of Greatness, pp. 962-964; July, 1994, Ann Thompson, review of Women, Writing, History, pp. 727-729.

RQ: Reference Quarterly, fall, 1991, Patricia Smith Butcher, review of The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present, p. 98.

Times Literary Supplement, November 29, 1985, David Nokes, review of Samuel Johnson, pp. 1351-1352; May 14, 1999, Margaret Anne Doody, review of Lary Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment, p. 25.

Virginia Quarterly Review, autumn, 1992, review of Women, Writing, History, pp. 115-116.