Elizabeth Williams Collection

Description

Elizabeth Williams (1938-2012) studied at Bedford College, London, and came to Leeds as an assistant lecturer in English Language and Medieval English Literature in 1965, after working for a year in the children’s books department of the Bodley Head publishing company. Miss Williams continued at Leeds until her retirement in 1991. Her edition of the Middle English poem Sir Orfeo and Sir Launfal (co-edited with Lesley Johnson) appeared in 1984; and she contributed to Christine Fell’s Women in Anglo-Saxon England, published in the same year. In addition to her work in the medieval field, she also developed and taught a massively popular course in Literature for Children.


Elizabeth Williams’s collection of children’s books contains some 500 works, mainly prose fiction by British writers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There are a number of the moralizing tales of Mrs Sherwood and Mrs Molesworth; lachrymose religious stories by Hesba Stretton and Mrs O.F. Walton; stirring adventure stories for boys by R.M. Ballantyne and G.A. Henty, and lively tomboy stories for girls by L.T. Meade. Hugh Lofting’s Dr Dolittle books are well represented, as are the uplifting works of Charlotte Mary Yonge, and Andrew Lang’s collections of fairy-tales. There are no less than thirty-five volumes of Mary Tourtel’s Rupert Bear story-books, clearly a particular favourite of Miss Williams.


Many of the books contain presentation inscriptions to children from family members, or were awarded by Sunday schools as prizes for regular attendance and good conduct.