Sybil Oldfield

Sybil Oldfield, née Mence, was born in London, half German, half English in 1938. Her German Grandmother, Anna Haag, a pacifist feminist socialist had been placed under Schreibverbot during the Nazi dictatorship. Her mother was classified as an 'enemy alien naturalized by marriage' in Britain in WWII. The family emigrated in 1948 to Christchurch New Zealand where Oldfield had her high school and first University education. She returned to London to study under Barbara Hardy at Birkbeck and taught English and Women's History at the new  University of Sussex since it was founded. She is now Research Reader in English at Sussex,  and Hon. Research Associate of The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press). She has been active in the psychological disarmament side of the anti-war movement since the 1960s and is married with four children and ten grand-children

 

Sybil Oldfield is the author of:   Spinsters of This Parish  - The Life and Times of F.M. Mayor and Mary Sheepshanks (Virago, London, 1984) F.M.Mayor (1872-1932), novelist and Mary Speepshanks (1872-1958), suffragist and pacifist, met at Cambridge in the 1890s. Despite the radically different paths each pursued they remained friends all their lives, for each, in their very different ways, chose to challenge the hobbling restrictions of their late Victorian world.

 

Women Against the Iron Fist, Alternatives to Militarism, 1900-1989 Essays on Kate Courtney, Maude Royden, Simone Weil, Virginia Woolf, Sophie Scholl, Christa Wolf and contemporary American women poets. (Basil Blackwell, Oxford and Cambridge, Mass. 1989). German translation: Frauen gegen den Krieg (S.Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt, 1992) Re-issued as Alternatives to Militarism 1900-1989 (Edwin Mellen Press, 2000)

 

The Collective Biography of Women in Britain, c.1550-c.1900: A select annotated bibliography. (Cassell/Mansell, London and New York, 1999.) The first and so far the only work of its kind, this bibliography reveals which women's lives were judged worthy of record in Britain by whom and when. Not just queens, but adventurers, actresses, artists, singers, writers, teachers, missionaries, martyrs, medical women and social reformers. It uncovers many under-used sources for women's history and the facinating illustrations range from Foxe's Book of Martyrs, c.1560 to the Suffrage Pageant of Great Women 1908.

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Doers of the Word,  A Biographical Dictionary of British women active between 1900 and 1950.  (Formally published as Women Humanitarians) (pb Lewes, 2006) Order for £10 + £2 p&p from: S.Oldfield, 4 Houndean Close, Lewes, East Sussex BN7 1EZ             Tel: +44(0) 1273 478776

(editor) Afterwords: Letters on the Death of Virginia Woolf (Rutgers University Press and Edinburgh University Press, May 2005) The first complete annotated collection of letters sent to Leonard Woolf and Vanessa Bell in the aftermath of Virginia Woolf’s death in1941. With an Introduction by the editor.

 

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Current writing:

The Old Familar Faces Poems on the experience of ageing (University of Sussex Print Unit, Brighton 2007) Anthology edited by Sybil Oldfield and Gwenyth Shaw
Kindertransport - before and after Poems by Lotte Kramer (Centre for German Jewish Studies, University of Sussex, 2007)
Jeanie: An Army of One – Mrs Nassau Senior - the 1st woman in Whitehall A treasure trove of hitherto unpublished, very candid letters helps reveal the amazing life-story of an extraordinary human being – artist’s muse, singer, social worker, co-founder of the British Red Cross, champion of the workhouse girl and so much more.	George Frederick Watts, 1857-8 © National Trust Photographic Library/John Hammond