Barbara Reynolds

Eva Mary Barbara Reynolds (13 June 1914 – 29 April 2015) was an English scholar of Italian Studies, lexicographer and translator. She wrote and edited several books concerning Dorothy Sayers and was president of the Dorothy L. Sayers Society. She turned 100 in June 2014. Her first marriage was to the philologist and translator Lewis Thorpe.

Early life The daughter of Alfred Charles Reynolds, and the god-daughter of writer Dorothy L. Sayers, Reynolds was educated at St. Paul's Girls' School and University College London.

Career Reynolds was an Assistant Lecturer in Italian at the London School of Economics from 1937 to 1940. She died on 29 April 2015.

Awards and honours The Italian government awarded Reynolds its silver medal for Services to Italian culture in 1964 and made her Cavaliere Ufficiale al Merito della Repubblica Italiana in 1978. She won the Edmund G. Gardner Memorial Prize for Italian Studies in 1964 and the Monselice International Literary Prize in 1976 for her translation of Orlando Furioso.

Major publications Her major work is the Cambridge Italian Dictionary, of which she was the General Editor. The first volume appeared in 1962 and the second in 1981. Beyond the Dictionary, her first book was a study of Alessandro Manzoni. She completed and annotated Paradiso, the last volume of Dorothy L. Sayers' three-volume translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, which was left unfinished at Dorothy Sayers' death. Reynolds afterwards translated Dante's La Vita Nuova and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso for the Penguin Classics. She wrote a study of Dante's life and work, Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man. In 1993 Reynolds published a biography of Sayers, who was her god-mother, called Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul (1993). She also edited four volumes of Sayers's letters and an additional volume.