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DHLSNA

D.H. Lawrence Society of North America

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In Memory of Virginia Hyde

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Virginia Hyde (1938 - 2019)
Husband:  David Barnes ( - 2021)

Tributes and Condolences
(
Link to her Personal Bio)

 

Tina Ferris:  I know that we Lawrentians all share in this shocking loss.  I greatly valued her friendship and mentoring--she was a true Lady in every sense of the word.  She was patient and caring, an enthusiastic and dedicated scholar--always giving of her time and her vast knowledge and sage advice.  I can't imagine a better role model--she meant the world to me. She will be so, so missed!  I'll always remember the happy times working together on the Lawrence Ranch nomination, the conferences, the Rananim Society email discussions, the editing advice on essays, and the DHLSNA website, which Virginia and her husband both started and contributed to through the years.  Two decades of Lawrentian adventures together!  She lives on in the memories of all the lives she has touched.

Helen Coles (founder of the Rananim Society discussion group): Thank you Tina for passing on this very sad news.  Dr Virginia Hyde was a strong support to The Rananim Society in its early days, and I offer my condolences to you and those others who will miss her presence.  Kind thoughts. . .

Betsy Sargent:  So sad to lose Virginia so early (80 is now seeming young to me).  We've lost a great soul.

Julianne Newmark Engbert:  Oh no!!!! This is so sad, so awful, to learn.  I am writing from the tarmac on a plane taxiing to a gate so I am writing quickly... I  just saw this message and am so heartbroken to read it!  Virginia was a friend and exceedingly generous mentor to me.  I will have to process this terribly sad news and write to David.  I know that with all my DHLSNA friends, I already miss Virginia so and feel her absence.
 
Randall Albright:  I'm very sorry to hear this. . . Virginia was kind to me.  She had highly developed skills of diplomacy, too.

Naveed Rehan:  I'm so saddened to hear of Dr. Hyde's passing.  I never met her, but I interacted with her a couple of times via email, and she was so helpful and encouraging, going out of her way to help me with whatever I needed.  My condolences to her friends and family.

Carol Siegel:  Virginia Hyde was one of the greatest Lawrence scholars who ever lived.  I remember coming to WSU Pullman to interview for a job at the Vancouver campus that was then just beginning its first year and being thrilled by her brilliance.  I felt isolated as a feminist Lawrence scholar who found Lawrence's work a valuable contribution to women's
literary traditions and a positive influence on a generation of women modernists and postmodernists.  At that time almost all women Lawrence scholars agreed with Kate Millet and Simone de Beauvior that Lawrence's work exemplified literary misogyny.  Virginia thought otherwise and encouraged me to continue to write about his works.  During the early years when I came to Pullman often as part of my work to set up Humanities at the new campus and to work with graduate students, I spent a lot of time with Virginia, sometimes staying at her and Dave's beautiful home.  She was always gracious and encouraging, but most valuable of all, she was inspiring.  Through the course of her too short life Virginia inspired thousands of students and scholars to do our best work.  I loved her as a friend and as a mentor and will miss her terribly.

Earl Ingersoll:  That is bad news. . . .  We got to know each well while we worked on the two volumes of essays generated by the Santa Fe conference and she was also working on the CUP Mornings in Mexico.  I don’t know how she did all.  She will be missed.

Charles Burack:  I did not know Virginia well, but as a graduate student I was inspired by her work on Lawrence and delighted that another Lawrence scholar shared a deep interest in Lawrence's use of Biblical symbols and images.  Her work influenced my dissertation and book on Lawrence's language of sacred experience.  She was also very kind and gracious to me when I joined the Lawrence society.  I send blessings to her beautiful soul and condolences to her family.

Lee Jenkins:  I am very sorry indeed to hear this sad news.  I didn't have the chance to meet Virginia--she was too unwell to participate in the MLA Austin panel, at which we had hoped to meet--but she was immensely supportive of my work, engaging me in correspondence, and sending me a signed copy of her Mornings in Mexico.  She was a superb scholar, and immensely generous to other scholars.

Edina Crunfli:  So sorry to hear about Virgina Hyde´s passing.  I had the pleasure to meet her and you at the same event in Santa Fe, 2005.  That´s really sad news!

Peter Balbert:  Virginia for me ranks among the most impressive human beings I have met the past forty years on the Lawrence circuit.  Not only a brilliant scholar— her Cambridge collection on Lawrence and Mexico is especially superb—but also a warm and humane woman committed to her profession, friends, and family.  She will be missed in so many ways.

Judith Ruderman:  Virginia Hyde's death is a great sadness for all those connected to Lawrence studies, not only to the many scholars she mentored but to everyone engaged in this common enterprise. We all have benefited from her intelligence and energy as well as her innate graciousness.  Her researching, writing, and editing skills will continue to aid the rest of us--now and into the future--in our own work.   Virginia was a beautiful person inside and out, and I mourn her loss as do all who knew her.

John Worthen:  Can I say a few words about my experience of working with Virginia Hyde?  As a member of the Board of the Cambridge Lawrence Edition, I corresponded with Virginia when she was in the later stages of her edition of Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, and was thoroughly impressed by her professionalism, her sheer range of knowledge and her willingness to respond to the suggestions of a person like myself.  Some editors curl up in self-defensiveness when another person attempts to help.  She did not; she accepted the collaborative way of working which most editions in the Cambridge project at some point entailed.  She responded, she was prepared to correct and she was unfailingly polite, no matter what her real feelings may have been.  The Cambridge Edition in one or two cases brought about the end of old friendships between scholars and Board members.  In her case, I believe she got on better with members of the Board after the editorial experience than before.  That was the person she was; she did work of a very high standard, and she nevertheless improved it.  She was a real scholar.

David Pratt:  I'm speechless . . from far far away . . DaP

Carrie Rohman:  I was delighted to meet Virginia very briefly at one or two conferences, and was always struck by her grace and her dedication to Lawrence and to her fellow Lawrence scholars.  She also was very helpful and earnest when I briefly served as Treasurer for the Society many years ago, and we did some donating to the Taos ranch.  Virginia was one of many established Lawrence scholars who genuinely welcomed unconventional approaches to Lawrence, back when I was new to the profession, and in this way modeled an intellectual generosity and openness that we can all emulate.

Jean Hegland:  Virginia was an important part of our extended family.  We were always very proud of her scholarly accomplishments, as well as enjoying her thoughtful and kind presence at family gatherings.

Eleanor Green:  Virginia was always a wonderful critic and reviewer for the D. H. Lawrence Review in addition to being a wonderfully warm and supportive friend.  With her death, we've lost a Laurentian who was a greatly respected scholar and a strong supporter of all Lawrence-related activities, someone to turn to when something needed to be done.  I was always taken aback by all she was able to accomplish, often while dealing with serious health problems.  She will be greatly missed.

William Clawson:  For the memory of our beautiful and talented cousin, Virginia.

Keith Cushman:  I was always pleased that Virginia and I had a Kansas connection.  She was born in Atchison and lived for part of her childhood in Kansas; I grew up in Salina.  As many others have remarked, she was an special, gracious, warm person.  I loved the catch-up notes that accompanied her and Dave's annual Christmas cards.  The Risen Adam and her CUP edition of Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays are truly important works of Lawrence scholarship.  But I also remember Virginia the feminist defending Lawrence the alleged misogynist in a series of essays.  She led the charge in her defense of The Plumed Serpent.  And she contributed so much to Lawrence and his world beyond her scholarship.  She and Tina Ferris put in all the immense, truly herculean labor it took to get the Lawrence Ranch onto the National Register of Historic Places.
                         She directed the 2005 conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, from Pullman, Washington: another huge job.  She and her husband Dave Barnes started the DHLSNA Website.  She did all this without seeking any recognition or acclaim.  Does anyone else remember that several of us conspired - was it at Kyoto? - to try to convince her to become the editor of the D. H. Lawrence Review?  She declined the invitation - graciously of course.  In the early 90s my wife Deborah Bell, a costume designer, worked in the summer theater program at the University of Idaho - which is just across the border from Washington State U.  Virginia and Dave welcomed her for dinner and gave her a tour of the Wazzu campus and the beautiful Palouse.  I'm rambling - but there's so much to remember about this lovely, kind, thoughtful, gracious, warm woman.  Deb and I mourn her passing.

Jimin Tian & Family:  Condolences to Dr. Barnes and family.  You are in our thoughts.

Christopher Pollnitz:  I met Virginia Hyde at the 2005 Santa Fe conference, during which she inspired me with the sense that we were fellow labourers in the Lawrence vineyard.  Her edition of Mornings in Mexico was of great assistance when I was editing Volumes I and II of The Poems.  In Volume III of The Poems Virginia’s Mornings in Mexico provided a context for Lawrence’s second and third visits to New Mexico, a context which was crucial to appreciating the uncollected poems Lawrence wrote there in 1924 and 1925.  After Santa Fe, she offered me confidence-boosting praise for a paper I gave to a later DHLSNA conference, and she pinpointed a quotation which I needed, about Pueblo ritual and music, for a still later conference paper/article.  Her grasp of the range of Lawrence’s religious thinking and speculation was astonishing.  We shall miss her in the vineyard, but she has taught us, as no-one else could, how to appreciate its fruits.

Sara Colt:  In loving memory of my dear cousin, Virginia Hyde.

 

In Lieu of Flowers, the family requests memorial gifts
in the name of Virginia Hyde be made to the DHLSNA.

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