Marion Kingston Stocking

Marion Kingston Stocking (June 4, 1922 – May 12, 2009) was an American literary scholar, educator, editor, book reviewer, advocate for the arts, memoirist, and environmentalist whose career spanned six decades. She was best known as editor of Beloit Poetry Journal and as a scholar of the Romantic period, specifically the circle of writers and thinkers associated with poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron.

Life

Early life and education

Marion Stocking was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on June 4, 1922, the oldest daughter of William and Louisa (Schucholtz) Kingston. She grew up in Melrose, Massachusetts, and graduated magna cum laude from Mount Holyoke College in 1943 with an A.B. in English composition. She went on to study English literature as a graduate student at Duke University, receiving her PhD in 1952. At Duke she worked with Newman Ivey White, an eminent scholar of the Romantic period. Her doctoral research, which focused on Claire Clairmont, a step-sister of Mary Shelley and lover of Lord Byron, led to her dissertation, "Claire Clairmont: a biographical and critical study," and to a long career as a Romanticist.

Career

Stocking's teaching career began in 1946 at the University of Maine Orono. She taught at Beloit College from 1954 (when she was the first woman to be hired to a tenure-track position in the English department) until her retirement in 1984. She was promoted to associate professor in 1959 and to professor in 1965.

The journal eventually became a life project for her and David Stocking. They shared editorial duties until his death in 1984,

Other editors who worked with Marion on the journal over the years included David Ignatow, Bink Noll, John Rosenwald, Ann Arbor, and Lee Sharkey. During Marion Stocking's long tenure, the journal was the first or early publisher of such poetic luminaries as Charles Bukowski, Anne Sexton, W.S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, Jonathan Aldrich, Galway Kinnell, and Sherman Alexie. In 2000, Marion Stocking edited the journal's 50th anniversary anthology, A Fine Excess.

Stocking published two major works of scholarship, both focused on the life and associations of Mary Shelley's step-sister Claire Clairmont. Both works are significant for the light they shed on the lives and thinking of Percy Shelley and Lord Byron and their friends. The first appeared in 1968: The Journals of Claire Clairmont, 1814–1827, edited with the assistance of David Mackenzie Stocking. The second publication, appearing in 1995, was a two-volume collection of The Clairmont Correspondence, 1808–1879, the culminating work of a career of biographical research. William St Clair, reviewing the volumes for the Literary Review, called the publication "an event in literary history. The last remaining unpublished source for Shelley and Byron, and for the long Victorian aftermath endured by the women, is now made available in a magnificent edition. Most of the letters are published in full for the first time. Marion Kingston Stocking ... is the perfect editor, and the book is a delight." In recognition of her scholarly achievements, Stocking received the Keats-Shelley Society Distinguished Scholar Award in 1996 and the International Byron Society Elma Dangerfield Prize in 1997.

With funds provided by friends of the Stockings in 1984, Beloit College established the David & Marion Stocking Prize, which is awarded annually to the student who submits the best piece of non-fiction prose.

Post-retirement

Upon retirement, Stocking moved to Lamoine, Maine, where she and her husband had spent their summers since 1970. In addition to her editorial work, Marion Stocking devoted fifteen years of service to the Maine arts community, first as a member of the Maine Arts Commission (1984–1988) and then as chair of its Literature Panel (1986–1988). She later served as a commissioner and chair of the Community Arts Committee (1993–1999). In 1997 she edited the Hancock County Cultural Directory. Meanwhile, she continued teaching and mentoring for special projects as a faculty associate of the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine.

Marion Stocking's papers are housed in the Beloit College Archives, and she is represented in the Maine Women Writers Collection in the archives of the University of New England.