Marilyn Butler

Marilyn Speers Butler, Lady Butler, FRSA, FRSL, FBA (née Evans; 11 February 1937 – 11 March 2014) was a British literary critic. She was King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge from 1986 to 1993, and Rector of Exeter College, Oxford, from 1993 to 2004. She was the first female head of a formerly all-male Oxford or Cambridge college.

Biography Marilyn Speers Evans was born in Coombe, Kingston upon Thames, on 11 February 1937. Her father, Sir Trevor Maldwyn Evans was a journalist and her mother was Margaret Speers "Madge" Evans (née Gribbin). At the age of two, she was evacuated with her mother and elder brother to New Quay in Wales, where she remained until the end of World War II. She was educated at Wimbledon High School and St Hilda's College, Oxford, graduating with a first-class degree in English in 1958. She became a school teacher, but in 1960 joined the BBC as a journalist. On 3 March 1962, she married David Butler; the couple had three sons. She was a Fellow of the British Academy.

Works Books Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (1972) Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975) Peacock Displayed: A Satirist in His Context (1979) Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760–1830 (1982) Mapping Mythologies: Countercurrents in Eighteenth-Century British Poetry and Cultural History (2015)

Edited books Frankenstein: 1818 text (Oxford World's Classics, 1994, rpt 1998, 2008)