Frank Gloversmith dedicated tree - University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
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JamesA60
N 50° 51.929 W 000° 05.293
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A tree dedicated to Frank Gloversmith, an English lecturer at the University of Sussex.
Waymark Code: WM1305A
Location: South East England, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 08/18/2020
Views: 0
This is a tree dedicated to Frank Gloversmith, an English lecturer at the University of Sussex. It is located to the east of Library Square.
The plaque reads:
In memory of
Frank Gloversmith
1926-2009
Who loved literature and its students
According to the Suss-Ex newsletter 14 (
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Frank Gloversmith, Lecturer in English in the old School of English and American Studies, died on 10th August 2009. A graduate of the University of Manchester, he was Head of English at Cambridge Grammar School where he met John Holloway of Queen’s College. Holloway invited him to do some college teaching, which led to his appointment at Sussex in 1964. He spent the rest of his professional career at Sussex, until his retirement in 1992, apart from a year as Visiting Lecturer in Munich (1972-3) where he encountered new horizons, and his partner, Ulrike Meinhof, now Professor of German at Southampton, who survives him.
Frank’s interests included the English novel and the new sociological approaches to literature, reflected not only in extremely popular lectures but in his Penguin edition of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1969) and his short study of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1971). In 1972 he organised a very successful conference at Sussex on Writing in the Thirties, with the participation of already legendary figures such as Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender. His continuing engagement with the Thirties led to his edited collection Class, Culture and Social Change: a New View of the 1930s (1980) which was followed by a more theoretical collection on The Theory of Reading (1984). Vigorous, combative, energised by the ‘theory wars’ in English studies in the 1970s and 1980s, he espoused and commended radical approaches to his discipline with the conviction of a lay-preacher. Even in retirement he never seemed to get any older. He stimulated generations of Sussex students, including the novelist Ian McEwan whom he presented for an honorary degree in 1989.