Lorna Sage

Lorna Sage (13 January 1943 – 11 January 2001) was an English academic, as well as a literary critic and author, known widely for her contribution to the consideration of women's writing.

The eldest child of Valma and Eric Stockton, she was named after Lorna Doone. Sage was born at Whitchurch, Shropshire, England, and educated at the nearby Hanmer village school in Flintshire, Wales, then at the Girls' High School in Whitchurch. Her childhood in the late 1940s and early 1950s is recalled in her last book Bad Blood. Sage became pregnant when she was 15 but was able to continue her education and won a scholarship to read English at Durham University, only after the university changed its admission rules to allow married couples to study there. Sage went on to receive an MA from Birmingham University for a thesis on 17th-century poetry.

All of her academic career was spent at the University of East Anglia, where she was Professor of English Literature from 1994. She edited The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English (1999) which has become a standard work. In the Preface she wrote: "In concentrating on women's writing...you stress the extent and pace of change, for the scale of women's access to literary life has reflected and accelerated democratic, diasporic pressures in the modern world". At her death, she left behind the draft of the first part of a work on Plato and Platonism in literature.

Sage's book reviews appeared in the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times Book Review and The Observer, mentioning the works of Angela Carter, as well as covering studies of works of numerous authors, including Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Thomas Love Peacock, John Milton and Thomas Hardy.

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