Ruth Padel - Biography

Biography

Padel is daughter of psychoanalyst John Hunter Padel and Hilda, daughter of Sir (James) Alan Noel Barlow 2nd Baronet and Nora Barlow, née Darwin, grand-daughter of Charles Darwin, through whom Padel is Darwin's great-great-grandchild. Her brother is historian Oliver Padel; cousins include prison reformer Una Padel, sculptor Phyllida Barlow and biographer Randal Keynes. Her uncle is Horace Barlow. Padel was born in Wimpole Street where her great-grandfather Sir Thomas Barlow practised medicine. She attended North London Collegiate School, studied classics at Lady Margaret Hall Oxford where she sang in Schola Cantorum of Oxford, wrote a PhD on Greek poetry, and was first Bowra Research Fellow at Wadham College Oxford which altered its Statutes for her to accommodate female Fellows. She was thus among the first women to become Fellows of formerly all-male Oxford colleges. She taught Greek at Oxford and Birkbeck, University of London, taught opera in the Modern Greek Department at Princeton University, has lived extensively in Greece, and in Paris where she sang in the Choir of Église Saint-Eustache, Paris. Her publishing career began in 1985, while she was teaching Greek at Birkbeck College, with a poetry pamphlet. Later she left academe to support herself by reviewing and publish her first collection, 1990. She was married to philosopher Myles Burnyeat.