ABSTRACT
Dorothy Whitelock, eminent Anglo-Saxonist of social and literary history, was born in Leeds on 11 November 1901 and died in a Cambridge nursing home on 14 August 1982. The youngest of six children, she was brought up in a Yorkshire family and remained devoted all her life to the shire, its traditions, and its forthrightness. Her father, Edward, died when she was only two, and there followed a period of financial worry. Her mother, Emmeline, coped magnificently, and the children were able to take full advantage of the educational opportunities offered at that time in the public sector. Though frail, Whitelock showed academic ability from an early age. She followed the golden road open in the early twentieth century to all bright children from stable and supportive families and received a good grounding in the humanities at the local grammar school. Leeds High School was in fact outstanding, fit to be compared with the top civic schools at Birmingham, Bristol, or Manchester. Whitelock proved an excellent pupil and was offered a place at Newnham College, Cambridge, at the age of eighteen. It is a measure of her family’s support that, although money was tight, there was no question of her not taking up her place. Sensibly she was encouraged to delay a year, which she spent profitably studying at the local University of Leeds, an institution already making a reputation for itself as a strong center for early English language and literature. She was therefore a little more mature academically than many of her fellow first-year undergraduates when she went to Cambridge in October 1921 to read the relatively new Section B of the English Tripos under the direction of H.M. Chadwick.
