Norman Page obituary

The Guardian

18-03-2025

My father, Norman Page, who has died aged 94, was a scholar of English literature. For more than three decades he edited a stream of academic books on literary figures and their work. He also wrote critical biographies of Thomas Hardy (1977), AE Housman (1983) and Muriel Spark (1990).
A lecturer by trade, Norman produced a volume on the language of Jane Austen and an account of the years that Christopher Isherwood and WH Auden spent together in Berlin.
In addition he was general editor of Macmillan's Modern Novelists and Author Chronologies series, as well as a contributor of chapters to academic books and a writer of articles and book reviews for journals.
Norman was born in Kettering, Northamptonshire, where his father, Frederick, and mother, Theresa (nee Price), ran a general store in the front parlour of their house. From Kettering grammar school he went to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, to study English. For most of the 1950s he taught the subject at various schools, including the Lycée Français in South Kensington, London.
In 1958, he married Jean Hampton, a student at the Royal Academy of Music, after meeting her while holidaying in Spain. In 1960 they moved northwards so that Norman could teach at Ripon College of Education in Yorkshire, until nine years later he took up a junior lecturer's position at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, then flush with oil money. Later, back in straitened Britain, he would marvel at how the university library in Edmonton had had more cash than it knew how to spend.
While he worked in Canada, galley proofs soon began to cover the dining table. The Language of Jane Austen (1972) and Speech in the English Novel (1973) made his name quickly, and his scholarship ranged from Samuel Johnson to Evelyn Waugh to Vladimir Nabokov. At times he also crossed the border into history, as with The Thirties in Britain (1990). He was made a Guggenheim fellow in 1979 and elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1982.
Norman always kept his feet on the ground by teaching undergraduates and resisted blandishments to ascend into university management. In 1985 he returned to the UK as chair of English literature at the University of Nottingham, and the family settled in Oakham, Rutland.
He retired in 1993, and after Jean's death in 2002 he spent much of each year travelling – above all to India, where Mumbai became a second home until his 90s. There, as throughout his life and despite severely deteriorated eyesight, he remained ever open to new experiences, knowledge and friendships.
He is survived by his partner, Dinesh Kumar, four children, Camilla, Ben, Matthew and me, and three grandchildren, Will, Ed and Alice.