Janet Adam Smith
| Janet Adam Smith | |
|---|---|
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| Born | 9 December 1905 Glasgow, Scotland |
| Died | 11 September 1999 (aged 93) London, England |
| Occupation | Writer, editor |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Journalism |
Janet Adam Smith (9 December 1905 – 11 September 1999) was a writer, editor, literary journalist and champion of Scottish literature. She was active from the 1930s through to the end of the century and noted for her elegant prose, her penetrating judgement, her independence of mind – and her deep love of mountains and mountaineering.
Leonard Miall wrote: “Biographer, mountaineer, critic, literary editor, textual scholar, comic versifier, visiting professor, hostess, anthologist, traveller – there seemed to be nothing at which Janet Adam Smith did not shine. And she shone with an intensity that made others glow in response.”
She was born into the old Scots intellectual elite. Her father, Sir George Adam Smith FBA (1856–1942), was a Biblical scholar, Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament exegesis, at the Free Church College in Glasgow, and then, from 1909 to 1935, Principal of Aberdeen University. Her mother was Lilian Adam Smith, daughter of Sir George Buchanan, FRS, in whose honour the Royal Society's Buchanan Medal was created. Janet was brought up in a tradition of high thinking and simple but certainly not austere living.
In 1919 she went to Cheltenham Ladies' College, and in 1923 went on to Somerville College, Oxford, where she read English, graduating in 1926.
In 1935 she married Michael Roberts, who was a poet, critic, editor, mathematician, and, like her, a passionate mountaineer. Roberts's anthologies of contemporary verse had already established him as, in T.S. Eliot's phrase, "expositor and interpreter of the poetry of his generation".
They lived in Newcastle upon Tyne (where he taught at the Royal Grammar School), then from 1939 in Penrith (where the school was evacuated during the war). In 1945 the family moved to London, where Michael Roberts had become Principal of the College of St Mark and St John, in Chelsea (which later moved to Plymouth and became the University of St Mark & St John). They had four children: Andrew Roberts, Professor of the History of Africa at the University of London, b. 1937; Henrietta Dombey, Professor of Literacy in Primary Education at the University of Brighton, b. 1939; Adam Roberts, Professor of International Relations at Oxford University, b. 1940; and John Roberts, writer on energy issues and Middle East politics, b. 1947.
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