Valerie Pitt

Valerie Pitt (14 February 1925 – 4 January 1999) was a British academic and activist who was a professor of English literature. She was a doughty campaigner for the ordination of women and the disestablishment of the Church of England.

Early life and education Valerie Joan Pitt was born on 14 February 1925 in Peckham, South London, to Elizabeth (née Dixon) and William Bygrave Pitt. Named for St Valentine, on whose day she was born, Pitt had five younger siblings. Her family were working class and heavily involved in community work through strongly held socialist beliefs. Her paternal grandfather was a keen member of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, while her maternal grandfather Dixon was part of the Bakers Union leadership and in 1913 spoke to a crowd massed in Trafalgar Square during a major bakers' strike. Her lorry driver father entertained the children with songs and stories he had learned in school or from his time in the army. Pitt was particularly taken with his recitations of Tennyson's poems, which had a strong influence on her later academic career. Four of the Pitt children attended Oxford University. Pitt's dissertation for her BLitt explored the roots of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley's philosophy.

Pitt's major academic publication was her book on Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Tennyson Laureate, published in 1962.

Church of England activism Pitt first joined the Anglican Communion whilst an undergraduate at Oxford, having met and been influenced by the Anglican priest and scholar Austin Farrer. She was mentored by Michael Ramsey, later Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1960s. Her confessor for the next 50 years was Percy Coleman.

Pitt was part of the Chadwick Commission (Archbishops' Commission on Church and State) which ran between 1966 and 1970. She was a strong advocate for the disestablishment of the Church of England. She considered that the creation of the Church of England in the Tudor era had led to "inherited structures of society...creating and reinforcing a mindset in the population in which religious duty keeps people from questioning secular oppression". She went on to state "the basic premise of establishment is a lie. There is no commonalty between the people of England and the Church of England. The acceptance of that lie, the fact that it has got into the blood and bones of our communion, is actually paralysing: the church does not really know what the people are like and neither does it understand its own identity".

Some of Pitt's papers, including correspondence with Katherine and Austin Farrer, were donated to the collection of the Bodleian Library in Oxford after her death by her sister Mrs Kirkwood.