Barbara Everett 1932-2025

Barbara Everett, who died on Friday, 4 April at the age of 92, was for many years a fellow of Somerville College, Oxford. Her books include Poets in Their Time and Young Hamlet: Essays on Shakespeare’s Tragedies. She published editions of Antony and Cleopatra and All’s Well That Ends Well, as well as writing many influential essays on the plays. Among her subjects in the LRB have been Shakespeare’s romances, the Sonnets, Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, Measure for Measure and Falstaff. She also wrote pieces on writers including Pope, Keats, Austen, Henry James, Philip Larkin and Barbara Pym.

As Seamus Perry writes in his introduction to a new selection of Everett’s pieces from the London Review, her ‘criticism is distinguished by the extraordinary sympathy and intelligence with which it celebrates the co-presence of life and art in great writing’:

She defines no theoretical position, and indeed has spoken on occasion with acute misgiving about the ‘systematic method’ to which a professionalised discipline is drawn. ‘There is no such thing as a “text”, and if there were it would degrade literature to be treated as one,’ she once said. The really decisive point is that ‘some people are much better readers than others, whether of books or of reality, better in the sense of “truer”, more accurate and more revealing.’ Barbara Everett reads both books and reality wonderfully well. No one could better exemplify Eliot’s axiom that ‘there is no method except to be very intelligent.’

She will be much missed.