Professor Marilyn Gaull: A Personal Tribute by Bysshe Inigo Coffey

This tribute in memory of Professor Marilyn Gaull, scholar of Romanticism and founding editor of The Wordsworth Circle, has been contributed by Bysshe Inigo Coffey.Marilyn Gaull was a friend. I can say this, though I never met her, for I am one of the younger scholars she encouraged and inspired. I miss her sorely. Late at night, I find myself heading to the computer to write to her, to seek counsel, which she always provided so amply.Since her passing, those who knew and loved her have been sharing memories of her spectacular generosity, intellect, and integrity. (But how is one to sum up all of her magnificent qualities in the confines of a triad?) When I try to describe what she meant to those she knew and the magic she produced, I find myself needing to crib from Shelley: I stand "on that verge where words abandon us." So, I head to Michael O’Neill’s penultimate collection, Return of the Gift, in which he so soundly describes Marilyn, his friend and editor, in the second stanza of an acrostic to her:

Giving yourself to othersall the time, holding us toultimate principles and the flux,letting us learn and take notice,leading us to look, to look for once, at the primeval, sun-touched fell.

Marilyn’s example, with her impeccable standards of scholarship, and devotion to the Romantic period, will live on through The Wordsworth Circle and its editorial team. Founded in 1970, the journal, as Peter Manning attests, answered a pressing and, what now seems to us of a later generation, a surprising need—scholars did not then have access to a journal devoted to the first-generation Romantics. Under Marilyn’s leadership The Wordsworth Circle has grown into one of the most prestigious and internationally celebrated journals devoted to Romantic scholarship. It has published the work of celebrated scholars, but it has always encouraged novices like me too. It is a place of energetic exchange and endless encouragement. With The Wordsworth Circle, Marilyn was truly "holding us / to the ultimate principles."Marilyn’s book, English Romanticism: The Human Context (Norton, 1988), is the best introduction to the period ever written. Prescient, with clear yet enviably elegant prose, the book repays consistent revisiting. This was to be her only book, but, then, Marilyn believed strongly in the importance of journals and the article; she was a midwife to thought: "giving [herself] to others / all of the time." The various essays she wrote over her long career are penetrating, wide-ranging, and always of consequence.For me, she lives on in another way too: in the famous and notorious stylesheet of The Wordsworth Circle. Even a stylesheet grew into something unforgettable under Marilyn’s hand. It showed me immediately just how flabby my writing was; it now forms my compositional super-ego. I delight in introducing my undergraduates to it. Invariably, they laud the clarity of the writing, the much-needed advice, and their ability to avoid needless and ugly error.In 1998, she was presented with the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Keats-Shelley Association of America. She was a true scholar. She not only wrote like an angel, she was a ministering one too, championing and enabling others. In this age of increasing triviality, her example is an enabling admonition.Marilyn once told me that her hero was Sir William Jones and that she hated how scholars had successively reduced him to one idea. She loved Jones’s generosity of spirit, his intellectual range, and the horizons of possibility that polymathic minds such as his afforded the Romantic authors who followed. She expressed a hope that one day she would write a book about the role eighteenth-century polymaths played in the birth of English Romanticism. What a book it would have been, and what a penetrating insight in itself.Marilyn did not like the word "influence." I remember being told off for using it: she preferred "presence." I like that, and I will crib from her too. Marilyn Gaull will be a presence that will remain with all who knew her always.