Elizabeth Marie Pope (Washington, D.C., 1917-1992) was an American author specializing in Elizabethan England and the works of John Milton and William Shakespeare.
Elizabeth Marie Pope was born on May 1, 1917 in Washington, D.C., to Christopher Herman Pope and Florence Anna Thompson Pope. In 1940, she received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College, and went on to Johns Hopkins University, where she took her Ph.D. in 1944. She taught English as a professor at Mills College for thirty-eight years before retiring on June 30, 1982. She was a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism.
Elaine B. Johnson, in her book Contextual Teaching and Learning, fondly describes her memories of studying Shakespeare and Milton with Dr. Pope (pages 50-51). Johnson recalls a teacher who was courteous, humorous, compassionate, lively, and excellent at drawing connections between her students' lives and the moral lessons of Shakespeare and Milton. Johnson also includes the comment that Dr. Pope was "weighed down by a heavy brace on one leg" and was white-haired, indicating that she took courses from Dr. Pope toward the end of her tenure as professor. For Johnson, Dr. Pope was not only an engaging lecturer, but facilitated class discussion with open-ended questions and interest in her students' comments.
Her Newbery Honor-winning novel for young adults, The Perilous Gard, is an imaginative retelling of the ballad of Tam Lin set in the latter days of Queen Mary I of England and the early days of Queen Elizabeth I, featuring a strong, independent, clever young heroine, Kate. It also sympathetically discusses remnants of ancient pagan Britain driven into hiding by the coming of Christianity. Many of its themes will be familiar from the Arthurian legends, which are referred to at the opening of the novel.
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