Greta Hort

Grethe Hjort (1903–1967) was a Danish-born professor of Danish and English literature. After graduating from the University of Copenhagen, she moved to Cambridge where she studied at Newnham College, earning a Ph.D. in 1931 and subsequently becoming a Pfeiffer research fellow at Girton College. While there, she obtained British citizenship and changed her name to Greta Hort. In 1938 she moved to Australia where she was appointed principal of University Women's College at the University of Melbourne. After resigning in 1946, she moved to Prague where she undertook biblical research until 1956. She then returned to Denmark, becoming Professor of English Literature at Aarhus University from 1958 until her death in 1967. She pioneered a programme of studies including Australian and Commonwealth literature and for the first time taught English-literature courses in the English language.

Early life and education Born on 25 May 1903 in Copenhagen, Grethe Hjort was the daughter of the meteorologist Vilhelm Hjort (1861–1920) and his wife Anne Margrethe née Ulrich (1878–1942). On graduating from N. Zahle's School in 1922, she studied English at the University of Copenhagen where she received the university's gold medal in 1925 and earned a master's degree in 1927. After teaching English literature for a short period at the university, in 1929 she moved to Cambridge where she studied at Newnham College, earning a Ph.D. in 1931. She then became a Pfeiffer research fellow at Girton College, publishing two significant works on the literature of the Middle Ages: Sense and Thought, A Study in Mysticism (1936) and Piers Ploughman and Contemporary Religious Thought (1938). While in England, she acquired British citizenship and changed her name to Greta Hort to facilitate its pronunciation in English. Hort won an Aurelia Henry Reinhardt International Fellowship and planned to go to Harvard University, but passed it up and moved instead to Australia.

Career

Melbourne, Australia In 1938, Hort was appointed principal of the newly established University Women's College at the University of Melbourne. At a welcoming reception she stated: "I come of a race that has spread all over the world and has made its home in diverse countries. I hope that I have the home-building qualities of my forefathers and that I have learnt from them that one is never lost in a friendly country." Diana Dyason who was a resident at the college remembers her dreary dress and thick grey stockings, almost a caricature of her Cambridge years. But Hort tutored competently in philosophy, demanded high academic standards and encouraged her students to develop a greater sense of freedom and self-government than was usual at the time.

Prague, Czechoslovakia

In October 1946, Hort resigned as college principal and accompanied her partner, the geographer Julie Moschelesová, to her native Czechoslovakia. She had met Moschelesová in Melbourne at the Czechoslovak branch of the Red Cross where she was president. From 1947, she spent five years in Prague where she undertook research on the Old Testament and the history of religion. and "The Death of Qorah" (1959). In the early 1990s, a "Greta Hort Scholarship" was established for Ph.D. student exchanges between the University of Melbourne and Aarhus University. It is now supported by the Dannebrog Foundation.