Virginia Tufte

Virginia Tufte is an author and distinguished emerita professor of English at the University of Southern California. Her special fields are Milton, Renaissance poetry, and the history and grammar of English. She holds Ph.D and M.A. degrees in English literature from the University of California, Los Angeles, an M.A. from Arizona State University, and an A.B. from the University of Nebraska.

She was born in Nebraska, and was married in Omaha in 1940 to Edward E. Tufte, who was city engineer and public works director of the city of Beverly Hills, California, for many years. Their son is Edward Rolf Tufte, leader and author in the field of information design, and active as a sculptor.

Her most notable recent work is Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style (2006), successor to Grammar as Style (1971). Grammar as Style developed a cult of followers in the late twentieth century, several decades after it had gone out of print, prompting her to write the new book.

Besides her work on syntax and style, Tufte is notable for books and essays in two other areas of literary study and for a video biography. Her book The Poetry of Marriage: The Epithalamium in Europe and its Development in England (1970), a comprehensive history of the English epithalamium, opened up an area of study for other scholars on a historical genre with centuries-old classical and Christian roots. “Epithalamium” means “upon the wedding couch”, and hundreds of such poems constitute a genre in many countries.

The third area of recent work consists of many studies of artists as interpreters of John Milton’s poems. Besides numerous essays and contributions to books in this field, some in collaboration with Wendy Furman-Adams of Whittier College, she wrote and produced a one-hour video biography of a literary illustrator Reaching for Paradise: The Life and Art of Carlotta Petrina (1994) that has appeared on educational television stations, is archived in college and university libraries, and is in use in classrooms.

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