ABSTRACT
E.M.Simpson (1885-1963) was the first woman to take a D.Phil, at Oxford. After a spell as Assistant in English at Bedford College London 1909-11, she became tutor in English literature at St Hugh’s College, Oxford 1918-21. She worked on Elizabethan translations of Seneca, on BenJonson and on Donne, where she is known for her editing of his sermons. She entered upon her lifelong engagement with Donne’s prose by calling attention to its disregarded literary merits, as well as to the links between Donne’s poems and his other writings (‘Donne’s Sermons, and Their Relations to his Poetry’, Modern Language Review, 7 (1912), 40-53).
