January 21, 2009

Sally Ledger (December 14, 1961 to January 21, 2009), British scholar in the field of 19th century literature, authored or edited a number of books. These include

The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle  (1997) and
Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (2007), to mention just two. She also wrote Henrik Ibsen (1999).

In this last book she quotes a contemporary reviewer Clement Scott who panned the  London debut of Ibsen's The Doll's House, on the grounds that Nora was unnatural; He said

her husband is an egotist and ... she has been a petted little fool'. In a subsequent review Scott reflected on this 'unnatural . . . creature' that 'A cat or dog would tear any one who separated it from its offspring, ..

Ledger, according to her Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, finished her doctoral research at Oxford, and then assumed a post as fellow  at Royal Holloway, University of London. Among other positions she assumed a faculty position at Birkbeck College, University of London. " It was there that her international reputation grew as a leading authority on Victorian literature and culture." This meant much travel as she" lectured on Victorian sentimentality at Yale and at the Modern Languages Association in San Francisco. All this while her "warm and supportive marriage consolidated her wide interests outside academia, particularly a love of walking and of football....." Her death was sudden, and at home. Besides the loss to her husband, and son, and colleagues, her research on a "history of sentimentality from the Enlightenment onwards" was unfinished. .