Pamela Neville-Sington

Pamela A. Neville-Sington ( Neville; March 30, 1959 – March 1, 2017) was an American literary biographer and authority on the life and works of Fanny Trollope, Anthony Trollope, and Robert Browning.

Early life Pamela Neville was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on March 30, 1959. She received her advanced education at Harvard University followed by Somerville College, Oxford and a PhD at the Warburg Institute for which David Starkey was one of the examiners and which was published in volume III of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain as "Press, politics and religion".

Career While completing her PhD, she worked as a freelance cataloguer for the rival booksellers Bernard Quaritch and Maggs. While at Maggs she discovered the printer Manuzio's copy of the first Latin translation of five mathematical treatises of Archimedes by Commandinus, an important document of the Renaissance that had been overlooked by the firm for 60 years. She then edited a new edition of Fanny's Domestic Manners of the Americans for Penguin for which she also provided the introduction and notes and another as having "the quality of a superior Victorian novel".

In her forties, Neville-Sington was diagnosed with glaucoma which inhibited her examination of the primary sources she used to write biographies. She moved on to different forms of writing.

Personal life In 1987, she married David Sington, a documentary filmmaker who worked for the BBC, with whom she collaborated on a book on the influence of utopian thought. The couple had no children. A dog lover from youth when she had a poodle, she later kept Samoyeds whose breed history she studied carefully.

Death Neville-Sington died of pancreatic cancer on March 1, 2017.

Selected publications Authored Paradise dreamed: How utopian thinkers have changed the modern world. Bloomsbury, London, 1993. (With David Sington) Fanny Trollope: The life and adventures of a clever woman. Viking, London, 1997. Richard Hakluyt and his books &c. Hakluyt Society, 1997. (Hakluyt Society annual talk 1996) (With Anthony Payne) "A primary purchase bibliography" in L.E. Pennington (Ed.) The purchase handbook, 2 vols., 2nd series, Hakluyt Society, London, II, 528, 1997. "A very good trumpet" in Cedric C. Brown & Arthur F. Marotti (Eds.) Texts and cultural change in early modern England. Palgrave, 1997. "Press, politics and religion" in Robert Browning: A life after death. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2004. "Trollope, Frances (1779–1863)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.

Edited Trollope, Fanny. (1997) Domestic manners of the Americans. London: Penguin. (With introduction and notes)