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“... forms, and in those getting good results in their A-level examinations, would continue.’ But for Helen Gardner, who served at that time on the Robbins Committee on Higher Education, those confident extrapolators of trends figure cosily enough as ‘our statisticians’; and she is not assailed by any suspicion that she, as representing the literary ...”

“... In his preface to this celebratory volume of essays presented to Dame Helen Gardner on her 70th birthday, John Carey apologises for the fact that the topics discussed are restricted to 16th and 17th-century English literature. Dame Helen’s latest book, after all, was The Composition of ‘The Four Quartets ...”

“... Brooke-Rose had stayed in Oxford, instead of migrating to France, she might have been rather like Helen Gardner. Her new book is written with a crispness and a briskness which at once evokes a certain atmosphere: a highly intelligent unresponsiveness to theory, a fear of subjectivity (she even recalls, with obvious relish, her Oxford tutor’s phrase for ...”

“... from Four Quartets have been checked against the first English edition (1944) as given by Helen Gardner; all other citations have been checked against CPP [The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot, 1969].’ This is pointlessly inconsistent, since it means that some of the texts have been corrected to the text they first had in volume form ...”

“... of the poems I had better give a sample or two, explaining first that Empson, who hated what Helen Gardner made of the texts, and often attacked her with asperity and justice, also wanted readings that suited his view of the matter best, just as he rightly says she did. The quarrel extends to many poems, but I must select, and the best place to ...”

“... to whom they offered the chair during Lewis’s initial dithering, was that devout Anglican Helen Gardner.) As in the wider culture, such literary Christianity fell sharply out of fashion in the 1960s and 1970s, and Lewis’s reputation dipped correspondingly; though perhaps his children’s books maintained their standing. Once again, his ...”

“... he became friends with Geoffrey Keynes. In Oxford, and although he came down with a mere Second, Helen Gardner urged him to do a B.Litt. and write a dissertation on Yeats’s manuscripts. Stallworthy had no interest in writing a dissertation; he stayed on for a fourth year in Oxford only to try for a Blue. (My jealousy is out of control.) ...”

“... Daemon’, ‘Bastard’ and so on – don’t bring to mind the way Dame Helen Gardner organised her materials. (Speaking of organising one’s materials, the volume informs us no less than three times that in the 18th century a suicide’s corpse was usually buried naked at a crossroads impaled on a stake.) A dash of Gothic ...”

“... example involves the British anthology The Terrible Rain: The War Poets 1939-45, edited by Brian Gardner and published in 1966; not only did it exclude Gaelic work, but its sole mention of Sorley MacLean (who lived until 1996) occurs when Gardner lists him among poets killed in action during the Second World War. As the ...”

“... rejoinder (first published nine years ago in the periodical Raritan) to a famous attack on him by Helen Gardner. It was a bizarre episode. Gardner, invited to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures for 1979-80, described in them how for ten years she had been preoccupied with professorial duties and close textual ...”

“... and the author was encouraged by its success to complete a Shakespearean trilogy. Since, as Helen Gardner says, ‘the facts that are clearly established’ about Shakespeare’s life ‘could be written by a neat writer on two sides of a postcard’ (LRB, Vol. 6, No 6), this represents a considerable feat of expansion – but no other kind of ...”

“... of criticism’ may sound odd or suspicious to English critics: not long ago Dame Helen Gardner took issue with me for calling the Church an institution, and it is unlikely that anybody who thinks like her will find a use for Hohendahl’s term. There are ways of doing criticism which make all speculation about its method, or its ...”

“... Millers and Agates. Miller’s suspicion was strengthened by reading some remarks made by Dame Helen Gardner, ‘one of Eliot’s most distinguished sponsors’. She had remembered some good stage performances she had seen before 1960 – with ‘extremely beautiful costumes by a firm called Motley’ – but she claimed she could hardly remember the ...”

“... to join ‘the chorus of mere whingers against Theory, all those mouthy conservatives from (say) Helen Gardner . . . to Roger Shattuck . . . with their romps up and down the glooming critical slopes of the Blooms, Allan and Harold’ – this is a fair sample, unfortunately, of his idea of lively prose. He accepts that post-structuralism, new ...”

“... would have written a more guarded sentence. A similar abrupt confidence (which reminds me of Dame Helen Gardner) marks her observation that Miranda’s strangely violent language to Caliban in The Tempest has nothing to do with sexual repression on the island but is, in fact, detached from the character of Miranda, mere impersonal poetic affirmation of ...”