Rosalie Littell Colie

Rosalie Littell Colie (1924-1972) was a professor of comparative literature, a specialist in Renaissance English literature, and a poet.

She received a B.A. from Vassar College in 1944, a M.A. from Columbia University in 1946, and a Ph.D. in English and History from Columbia in 1950.^[1]

In 1948-49, she was an instructor at Douglass College, and was appointed as Assistant and Associate Professor at Barnard College and Columbia, 1949-1961.^[2] She taught and researched at Wesleyan College 1961-1963, at the University of Iowa from 1963 to 1966, was visiting professor at Yale in 1966-67, and was visiting research professor at Oxford University, 1967-68,^[3] Lady Margaret Hall College.^[4] In January 1972 she received the first appointment of a woman to the chairmanship of an academic department at Brown University, in the Department of Comparative Literature.^[5] She was the first to hold the Nancy Duke Lewis Professorship, the first professorship at Brown endowed for women, which had been established in 1967.^[6] She received the Guggenheim Fellowship in Renaissance Studies twice, in 1958 and 1966.^[7]

Hannah Arendt was a visiting fellow at Wesleyan College from 1961 when Colie was teaching at Wesleyan.^[8] Their correspondence began in 1962, and Colie became a long-term correspondent of Arendt. In 1963, Colie had intended to fly to Europe to meet Arendt for a holiday, but these plans were thwarted by Colie's appointment to a position at the University of Iowa. On 19 March 1963, she wrote to Arendt: "I am going to go to Iowa: it is a good job. Full professorship, in both English literature and history, which is ideal. […] I feel a thousand years younger all of sudden, as if the albatross had gone off my neck and I could start to be a human being again instead of such a fake. […] The Iowa thing may ruin our summer plans. [S]han't get paid until September and have no dough."^[8] On Arendt's return from Europe, they spent a week together before Colie moved to Iowa, and they met again in Chicago in May, 1964.^[8]

Arendt wrote her a supportive reference in 1967 for her visiting position at Oxford University as Talbot Research Fellow, in which she described Colie as "one of the most erudite women I have ever known."^[8] Arendt also wrote a letter of recommendation for her later position at Brown.^[8] Letters between Colie and Arendt are held in the Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington DC.^[9] They have been studied by the feminist scholar, Kathleen B. Jones.

Colie published works on Renaissance paradox, genre theory and Shakespeare. She drowned on 7 July 1972 when her canoe overturned on the Lieutenant River near her home in Old Lyme, Connecticut.^[10] Her friend George Robinson, an editor at Princeton University Press, published a posthumous selection of her poems.

• Some Thankfulnesse to Constantine: A Study of English Influence upon the Early Works of Constantijn Huygens (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956).
• Light and Enlightenment: A Study of the Cambridge Platonists and the Dutch Arminians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957).
• Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).
• "My Ecchoing Song": Andrew Marvell's Poetry of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970).
• The Resources of Kind: Genre-theory in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).
• Some Facets of King Lear: Essays in Prismatic Criticism (London: Heinemann, 1974).
• Shakespeare's Living Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974).
• Atlantic Wall, and Other Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974).
• 'Literature and History', in James Thorpe, ed., Relations of Literary Study: Essays on Interdisciplinary Contributions (New York: MLA, 1967), pp. 1–27.^[11]
• 'The Essayist in His Essay', in John W. Yolton, ed., John Locke: Problems and Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 234–261.