Tributes to Professor Beth Lau (1951-2022)
The K-SAA is deeply saddened by the news of Beth Lau’s passing from metastatic cancer on November 2, 2022 at her home in Bloomington, Indiana. We would like to share two tributes to Dr. Lau, one by her colleague, Greg Kucich, and one by her former student, Kacie Wills.
Tribute to Beth Lau (1951-2022)
I write this “Tribute to Beth Lau” with both sorrow over her passing and profound gratitude for counting her as a dear friend and one of her generation’s leading, most influential scholar/teachers in the field of British Romanticism and related studies. I have been lucky enough to know Beth for 35 years, most of my career, during which time I grew to care deeply for her on a personal level and to admire her greatly as a gifted, tenacious, and prolific scholar, a dedicated teacher, and a magnificently collegial presence in our field, devoted to working joyously and tirelessly with her colleagues and students to further the understanding of Romanticism and its adjacent areas of study. I would like to share with all the anecdote of our first meeting, which took place at a 1987 Wordsworth Conference in Chicago, not only because of the humor of its microscopically Keatsean serendipity but also because it reveals so much of Beth’s characteristic scholarly acumen and collegiality. I had just recently finished a dissertation on Spenser’s impact on Keats and Shelley, and in combing the libraries of the world for all the insights I could unearth, I had been examining a Spenser volume marked by Keats now located at Harvard’s Houghton Library. Amy Lowell in her classic biography had provided an appendix reproducing these markings, mostly underlinings, which until then was our main source of knowledge for Keats’s Spenser markings. On first looking into this material, I was surprised to find a number of errors in the transcription. Aha, thought I, setting the record straight might supply a much-sought after publication in the Keats-Shelley Journal. After sending my manuscript essay off to the journal, however, I received a congenial reply from then editor, Stuart Curran, explaining that someone had recently submitted an article on the very same topic, that her name was Beth Lau, and that I should probably get to know her. In those pre-internet days, it was not so easy for younger scholars to get acquainted, which is why I was more than a little surprised when I sat down several weeks later at the Wordsworth conference dinner next to a young scholar whose name tag read “Beth Lau.” What could have been a very awkward dinner, turned into the start of a lifelong friendship and working relationship when Beth, a few years my senior, displayed the gracious kindness and warm collegiality that were so characteristic of her professional manner. Gently dispelling any potential rancor or competitiveness on my part, she created the welcoming space for what turned into a lifetime conversation about the unique talents of Keats, the thrills of annotation, the delights of Romanticism, and, particularly for that time, new approaches to Spenser-Keats studies. What impressed me so much, among many other things, was that someone not specifically working on Keats and Spenser had taken the time, made the intensive effort, and finely demonstrated the wherewithal to master such a highly focused topic. That kind of scrupulosity of effort informed a lifetime of scholarly work that is both widely ranging and minutely focused in its precise attention to detail.
Beth began her scholarly career auspiciously, completing a dissertation on Keats at the University of Illinois in 1980 under the direction of renowned scholar-editor of Keats Jack Stillinger. Beth always honored Jack, and she found his deep immersion in Keats and his great attention to precise scholarly and editorial details informing much of her own love of literature and the precise detail as well as engaging clarity of her writing. She proceeded through several appointments at different institutions until she found a true home at California State University in Long Beach, where she began working with tenure in 1990 and continued until her retirement in 2012. During this overall period, her scholarly productivity saw no lull, resulting in 6 books, 40 articles, 27 book reviews, and 58 conference presentations and invited talks. This impressive scholarly achievement made Beth one of the major voices of our generation in a variety of fields ranging from Keats to Romantic women authors to cognitive studies of Jane Austen to teaching approaches to Romantic era writers, and there was little let up after her retirement to her home region of the Midwest, Bloomington in particular. Perhaps the strongest mark of her love of writing and contributing to scholarly conversations can be traced in the rather stunning productivity of her retirement years. During that span of time, she published two more books and numerous articles, produced with the assistance of me and Daniel Johnson a wonderfully useful digital edition of Keats’s Paradise Lost annotations—complete with extensive editorial commentary and designed to be the just the first installment of an ongoing digital series titled The Keats Library and co-organized a major international conference in London on “Keats’s Reading / Reading Keats.” In the last year of her life, she diligently incorporated expanded versions of presentations from that conference along with fresh articles from distinguished Keats scholars into a collection of essays with the same titled dedicated to the memory of Jack Stillinger. Sadly, Jack had passed away by the time this volume appeared in print, but his family was extremely grateful for Beth’s steady, insightful management of such a stand-out festschrift commemorating Jack’s monumental achievements. I believe that all the contributors to this volume (comprising an A-list of world authorities on Keats as well as new scholars in the field) share that debt of gratitude.
Beth’s work over the years often centered on Keats, and she would remember some of the happiest days of her life working at Keats House in Hampstead and having lunch in the garden there with the Directors, her longtime friends Christina Gee and Roberta Davis, talking Keats while sipping delightfully from “a beaker full of the warm South.” More specifically, Beth’s Keatsean engagements centered on Keats’s reading and intertextual relations with other writers, the subject of many of her articles and two of her books, Keats’s Reading of the Romantic Poets (1991) and Keats’s Paradise Lost (1998), the latter of which provided the foundation for that valued digital project she launched, The Keats Library. One of the most important insights to emerge from Beth’s lifelong dedication to Keats’s habits of reading and writing has been her demonstration of the wide array of texts Keats devoured in a variety of genres—fiction, poetry, history, philosophy, literary criticism, classical writings—and the immense number of writers and artists who have responded to Keats’s works in a variety of literary and artistic formats.
Not at all confined to Keats, though, Beth’s work engaged with a compelling range of other literary areas central to the development of Romantic studies over the last generation. Much of her work, for instance, focused on the relationship between male and female Romantic writers, the subject of a number of articles and her 2009 edited collection of essays, Fellow Romantics: Male and Female British Writers 1790-1835, to which she contributed two essays along with the introduction, one on Frankenstein and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and another on Jane Austen and the major Romantic poets’ treatment of the imagination. This last topic actually inspired a series of seven different articles by Beth. The great significance of this important body of works lies in Beth’s emphasis on similarities as well as differences between male and female Romantic writers, which grants us a much-needed perspective on what factors shape the contours of Romantic-era writing shared in different ways by male and female authors. There is arguably no better sustained account of how Jane Austen’s fiction converges pervasively with many of the literary concerns and imaginative practices of female and male authors of her time.
In Beth’s continuing work on modes of mind in Romantic-era writers, she has also developed a substantial type of cognitive approach to Romantic literature, particularly Austen’s fiction, derived from cognitive neuroscience and psychology. Two articles on Wordsworth and current memory research appeared in 2002, followed by groundbreaking pieces on Jane Austen and cognitive therapy as well as what Beth titled “Sexual Selection and Female Choice in Austen’s Northanger Abbey.” This rich stream of interdisciplinary work eventuated just several years ago in Beth’s edited collection, Jane Austen and the Sciences of the Mind, now the go-to volume for cognitive approaches to Austen. There was little surprise, then, and much gleeful celebration in 2019 when Beth received the lifetime achievement award of “Distinguished Scholar” from the Keats-Shelley Association of America, a high-water mark of recognition that she cherished and for which she very kindly invited me to give the encomium (a heartfelt hymn of praise that informs much of this additional tribute).
In addition to these wide-ranging scholarly studies, Beth also dedicated a considerable amount of her scholarly time to the promotion of teaching Romanticism and nineteenth-century literature. In 1993 she co-edited with Diane Hoeveler an MLA volume on Approaches to Teaching Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and in 2002 she published an edition of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, complete with invaluable background material and critical essays along with her own major introduction explaining how the various critical interpretations over the years demonstrate the novel’s inexhaustible complexity. On the subject of teaching, I have heard much from Beth’s students over the years about her passionate commitment to helping students improve their interpretive and writing skills. And I know, from first-hand conversations with her, how many intensive hours she has poured into giving her students qualitative feedback on their writing.
One of the strongest consistent themes running throughout Beth’s career, in fact, is her lifelong practice of contributing to the development of her colleagues’ scholarly work. We all have experienced one way or another the tremendous benefits of constructive commentary on our work from colleagues, and, in her characteristically generous manner, Beth has made this provision of assistance and guidance a central component of her lifetime achievement. She served as a member of the editorial boards of the Keats-Shelley Journal and Literature Compass. A brief scan of her cv shows that she also worked as a reader of articles, proposals, and book manuscripts for the following publishing venues: Studies in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, PMLA, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Studies in the Novel, Modern Philology, South Atlantic Review, Oxford University Press, Ashgate Press, University of Massachusetts Press, and this list goes on and on. It is impossible to count up all of those scholar-teachers who have profited from Beth’s commentary over the last 35 years, for they are legion. We all owe her a great deal of thanks for making this kind of generous investment such a big part of her own lifetime achievement.
There is more, much more, to celebrate about Beth’s vigorous life outside of academe. Anyone gazing at her paintings that graced the walls of her Bloomington house would recognize that she was an accomplished painter. She was also a fine pianist. During her years in Bloomington, she invested considerable time in learning and promoting the rich cultural and political history of the region. She loved to travel and to undertake serious hikes, both locally and afar, while always relishing walks around the block early in the morning (even during icy Midwestern winters) with her much-loved dog, Jerry. One of her close friends fondly recalls her astonishing gift for reciting large swaths of poetry from memory while trekking through green fields and across undulating hills. She was much beloved by her husband, Roger, and the many devoted friends and relatives who gathered around her side during her last days. Beth was first diagnosed with breast cancer seven years before she passed, and she knew throughout that period that her time was limited. One of her most remarkable achievements was to soldier on energetically and courageously with life and work, never becoming consumed by her own hard affliction and always bestowing great love among her friends, relatives, and colleagues. Amazingly, just one month before she passed, Beth asked me and Daniel Johnson if we had the fortitude to set out with her on a new project of digitizing Keats’s annotations Shakespeare!
One grasps for words to adequately summarize a lifetime of accomplishment, both personally and professionally, like Beth’s. Perhaps the best language comes from Beth, herself, and her great mentor, Jack Stillinger. Jack was too ill to attend the Keats-Shelley Association ceremony honoring Beth as “Distinguished Scholar,” but he sent her this resounding note: “Congratulations, Beth! I wish I could be there to say how proud I am to have had you as my graduate student.” This was gold, Beth declared, from Jack Stillinger. She confided to me when we first talked about this event that “It will be the happiest day of my life.” How fine it is that Beth experienced such well-deserved happiness. Her passing leaves a vast hole in the hearts and minds of so many, yet she would also wish us to celebrate her joyful participation in all things good and all things Romantic.
Greg Kucich
University of Notre Dame
“I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter”: A Tribute to Professor Beth Lau
Many among the Keats-Shelley Association will remember Beth Lau as a thoughtful, meticulous, and energetic scholar. Her books on Keats, including Keats’s Reading of the Romantic Poets (1991) and Keats’s Paradise Lost (1998), remain critically important to the field and stand among numerous articles and edited collections she produced on not only Keats, but also Jane Austen and other Romantic writers. I could include a long list of Dr. Lau’s publications here that speak to the legacy she has left Romantic studies, but, to me, that legacy lies primarily in her work as a teacher.
I was fortunate to be one of Dr. Lau’s graduate students and to take the final graduate course on John Keats she taught at California State University, Long Beach. Prior to this class, I had the wonderful experience of being in her seminar on Romanticism, in which, among other key Romantic works, we read her 2002 edition of Sense and Sensibility. The Romanticism seminar was one of the first courses I took in graduate school, and Dr. Lau’s passion and enthusiasm for the literature and its authors was nothing short of contagious. Hers was the first class in which I’d ever been asked to recite poetry from memory, and it proved to be a fun and challenging exercise that thoroughly engaged all of the students, even the ones who seemed to resist the idea at first. What I remember most from that class was how naturally Dr. Lau could fill in the lines and continue on from wherever any student might have left off with their poem, whether a line from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” or a stanza from Percy Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.” She recited poetry with gusto, and because of her, I can still recite the entirety of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” from memory (which is, I think Dr. Lau would agree, a fun party trick).
Dr. Lau’s graduate seminar on the life and works of John Keats, however, has had the deepest and most lasting effect on my personal and professional life. Prior to this course, I had read a few of Keats’s poems in the Romanticism survey, but this intensive focus on Keats was something altogether unique. Dr. Lau was not just an expert on Keats—this word seems far too sterile a way to describe the passion with which she taught this course and the way that she embodied the poetic ideals Keats described. Reciting Keats’s poetry and reading his letters alongside Dr. Lau felt more like an education in how to live than a course “studying” literature.
As the course on Keats concluded, I expressed to Dr. Lau that I would like to develop my final paper into an MA thesis. Though she was retiring at the end of that semester and had no obligation to do so, she offered to supervise my thesis from Indiana. I remember mailing her drafts of my chapters and receiving her detailed notes and provocative questions responding to nearly every line of text I’d written. We had wonderful conversations on the phone about Keats’s poems, and throughout that year I grew more as a writer and a scholar than I could have ever imagined. This experience illustrates the type of scholar and teacher Dr. Lau was: unfailingly generous, instructive, and supportive.
I am incredibly grateful to Dr. Lau for setting me on the path that has led to my career as a Romanticist and a teacher. Mine are just a few of many, many stories that can be told by her former students to illustrate the tremendous impact she had on our lives. She didn’t just teach her students content: she taught us how to read literature in such a way that led to a relationship with texts and their authors; she set an example of living with gusto.
In reading through some of our previous email exchanges over the past week, I came across a conversation about Keats’s last letter (which Beth coincidentally wrote a beautiful essay about for the Keats Letters Project). I think it is fitting to end with those words from Keats, which she said “always brought a lump to my throat and moisture to my eyes”: “I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow.”
Kacie Wills
Allan Hancock College