Margaret Hubbard

Margaret Hubbard (16 June 1924 – 28 April 2011) was an Australian-born British classical scholar specialising in philology.

Career Hubbard excelled during her school career at Adelaide High School, which she attended on receipt of a Government bursary won in 1938. Upon graduating from high school she won the Tennyson medal for the top place in the leaving examinations, and Annie Montgomerie Martin prize for coming top in modern history. She was then awarded a scholarship to attend Somerville College, Oxford in 1948 to study Classics, the first time this scholarship had been awarded to an overseas applicant without an interview. Hubbard graduated in 1953 with a First Class Degree. She was the first woman to win the Hertford Scholarship. making her one of St Anne's College's 15 founding fellows. The noted novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch was also among this group, and dedicated her 1962 novel An Unofficial Rose to Hubbard. Hubbard served as University Assessor in 1964–5.

She spent her retirement travelling, cooking, reading, and doing jigsaws with her "adored companion" and partner Gwynneth Matthews, who had been a tutor in Ancient Philosophy at St Anne's, and with whom she had lived since at least the 1960s. In 2007 she was elected to an honorary fellowship at St Anne's, and the following year a one-day conference was held to commemorate Hubbard's work. She died in 2011.

Scholarship Hubbard worked primarily on Latin literature. Her major works include a "monumentally authoritative" commentary on Horace in two volumes (1970 and 1978), Horace, and Propertius. Eduard Fraenkel when asked to write about her suitability for the post as a tutor of Classics commented (quoted in her obituary), "When asked to say something about Margaret, I must face the risk of being charged with indulging in superlatives. She is really extraordinary."

Selected works