Nicolson, Marjorie Hope

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NICOLSON, Marjorie Hope

Born 18 February 1894, Yonkers, New York; died March 1981

Daughter of Charles B. and Lissie Morris Nicolson

The daughter of a newspaper editor, Marjorie Hope Nicolson spent most of her adult life in an academic environment, studying at Michigan, Yale, and Johns Hopkins, and teaching at Minnesota, Goucher, Smith, Columbia, and Claremont. She was a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton from 1963 to 1968. Nicolson earned many honors during her long and distinguished career and blazed many new trails for academic women. As the first woman president of the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa (1940), she explained that most academic women had not been able to distinguish themselves because it was hard to be "both scholars and ladies," in that women scholars "have no wives to look after social contacts and to perform the drudgery for them." She was the first woman to be elected president of the Modern Language Association, the first woman to receive Yale's John Addison Porter Prize for original work, and the first woman to hold a full professorship on Columbia University's graduate faculty.

Nicolson was fascinated with the impact on the literary imagination made by science and philosophy, especially in the 17th and 18th centuries. As early as 1935, Nicolson's lifelong interest surfaced in a study of The Microscope and English Imagination, in which she describes how the invention of the microscope had stimulated both serious and satiric themes in literature, even influencing the remarkable technique of Swift's Gulliver's Travels.

Several of her best volumes focus on the way scientific advances alter aesthetic judgments and hence modify literary treatments. For instance, A World in the Moon (1937) describes the changing attitudes toward the moon brought about by the telescope; Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (1959) describes humanity's shift from abhorrence of mountains as reflecting sin's disruption to attraction to mountains as symbols of the infinite; and Breaking of the Circle (1950) describes the dislocating insecurity caused by the Copernican Revolution as reflected in the works of John Donne and his contemporaries. Although this latter was her most influential book, it also caused considerable scholarly controversy because many argued that Nicolson had overestimated the importance of scientific theory to people who were accustomed to finding their security not in science but in religion. Newton Demands the Muse (1946), a study of how Newtonian optics affected 18th-century poets, merited the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize of the British Academy.

It is not surprising that a woman so interested in science and literature should turn her attention to John Milton, who was similarly attracted to the advanced scientific thought of his day. Accordingly, Nicolson edited a volume of Milton's major poems and published A Reader's Guide to Milton (1963), which has proved popular on many campuses.

This Long Disease, My Life: Alexander Pope and the Sciences (1968), written with G. S. Rousseau, after Nicolson's retirement, includes a detailed medical history of the poet, a study of five medical themes or episodes in his work, an extensive section on Pope and astronomy, and a concluding section on Pope's interest in the other sciences of his day, especially geology.

In addition to her books, Nicolson was a frequent contributor to periodicals. She edited American Scholar from 1940 to 1944 and served on the editorial board of the Journal of the History of Ideas for many years. Her work is never academic in the "dry-as-dust" sense; it pulsates with the fascination, wry wit, and human involvement she feels toward her subject. It is Nicolson's flair for making her point memorably that ensures her a continuing influence among lovers of literature.

Other Works:

The Art of Deception (1926). Conway Letters (1930). Voyages to the Moon (1948). Science and Imagination (1956). Pepys' Diary and the New Science (1965).