William Allan Neilson

William Allan Neilson , 1869-1946, American educator, b. Scotland, M.A. Univ. of Edinburgh, 1891, Ph.D. Harvard, 1898. He taught English in Scotland and Canada and at Bryn Mawr and Columbia and served (1906-17) as professor of English at Harvard. From 1917 until his retirement in 1939 he was president of Smith. He was author of a number of critical works, editor of the Cambridge and Tudor editions of Shakespeare (1906, 1911), and editor in chief of the second edition (1934) of Webster's New International Dictionary.

Bibliography: See M. F. Thorp, Neilson of Smith (1956).

Neilson, [Lilian] Adelaide (1848–80), actress. The English performer, whose own life was as tragic as some of the heroines she portrayed, was of illegitimate birth. A great beauty, she had slightly irregular features, which only added a certain piquancy to her dark eyes and chestnut hair, the latter sometimes dyed with a gold tinge. Neilson made several American tours between 1872 and 1879 and was called by William Winter “the best representative of Shakespeare's Juliet, Viola, and Imogen who had appeared on the stage in our time.” He wrote, “The subtlety of [her Juliet] was equaled only by its intensity, and neither was surpassed except by its reality.” Her other American offering included Rosalind, Beatrice, Pauline in The Lady of Lyons, and Lady Teazle. Biography: Adelaide Neilson, Laura Holloway Langford, 1885.