Newstead, Helaine

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NEWSTEAD, Helaine

Born 22 April 1906, New York, New York; died October 1981

Daughter of Nathan and Sarah Newstead

An only child of moderately well-off Jewish parents, Helaine Newstead spent her formative years preparing for a career as a pianist. She attended Hunter College, to which she returned as a tutor upon her graduation in 1928, and received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1937. At Columbia, Newstead met her mentor, Roger Sherman Loomis, who inspired her research into Arthurian legend.

For years, Newstead taught at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. Her attachment to this institution, and to scholarly organizations and causes, has been great: she was chairman of the Arthurian Romance group of the Modern Language Association (1956-57) and president of the Medieval Club of New York (1950-52) as well as chairman of the English Department both at Hunter College and at CUNY (1962-69). Among Newstead's more recent honors are an honorary doctorate from the University of Wales (1969), Fellow of the Medieval Academy (1976), and election to the Presidency of the International Arthurian Society (1972-75).

Newstead published several dozen articles and book reviews, many of them in the Journal of Romance Philology and PMLA. Her major work is probably her doctoral thesis, Bran the Blessed in Arthurian Romance (1939). Here, Newstead painstakingly traces many elements of the French grail romances to their Celtic antecedents; thus, she argues for the "existence of a Welsh stage in the transmission of Celtic material," restores creative credit to medieval Wales, and illuminates the process of myth-making and the accretion of legendary detail.

The unobtrusive style of Newstead's writing is somewhat warmer in the introduction to her anthology, Chaucer and His Contemporaries (1968). This work includes essays on the black death and medieval technology; it is refreshing in its relation of the literature to the life of the period. Newstead's no-nonsense approach both to scholarship and to human behavior may be seen in her learned articles as well. In a study of Chrétien de Troyes's Le Comte du Graal, for example, Newstead contends that Perceval does indeed have more than a spiritual relationship with a lady in great distress who comes to his bed. Her subject matter may be obscure and her style flatly academic, but her arguments appeal finally to what we know of real life; Newstead is as a scholar both down-to-earth and erudite.