Joanne Trautmann Banks

Joanne Victoria Belfiori, essayist, editor and teacher: born Stillwater, Minnesota 13 November 1941; Professor of Humanities and English, Pennsylvania State College of Medicine 1973-86; Professor, University of Richmond, Virginia 1986-88; Professor, Eckerd College, Florida 1988-2005; twice married (one son); died St Petersburg Beach, Florida 5 May 2007.

In May 1971 a young American academic, on sabbatical in England to examine the friendship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, visited Sissinghurst in Kent to consult Vita's son, Nigel Nicolson. Joanne Trautmann's study The Jessamy Brides (1973) so impressed Nicolson that when, that year, he was asked to edit Virginia Woolf's letters, over half of which were in US collections, he insisted that she be his American colleague. So began the collaboration that resulted in the publication in six volumes between 1975 and 1980 of The Letters of Virginia Woolf.

The Letters is an extraordinary and exemplary work of scholarly editing. Woolf was a compulsive letter-writer who carried on an enormous correspondence with family and friends. She wrote not only to get and exchange news or to share friendship, but also to stave off solitude or boredom and sometimes quite consciously to hone her prose. In the almost 4,000 letters that had survived when Nicolson and Trautmann set out to publish them unabridged, even more than in the diaries she kept, the writer's personality, tone of voice, prejudices and foibles, as well as her hopes and fears, all come across largely unfiltered.

Nicolson and Trautmann's achievement is even more remarkable when one realises that in 1973 even the locations of most of the letters were unrecorded, few of them had been transcribed, even fewer published and almost none placed in chronological order or annotated. Although a few letters have surfaced since 1980, by the time volume six appeared, the record was there for all to read.

She was born Joanne Victoria Belfiori in 1941, the second daughter of Philip and Virginia Belfiori, and received her early education in River Falls, Wisconsin. An early love of Celtic literature led her to take her PhD at Purdue University in Indiana with a thesis on the work of Frank O'Connor and Sean O'Faolain and in 1967 she was appointed to the English faculty at Drexel University in Philadelphia. There she concentrated on the British modernists, contributing to literary criticism of the works of Katherine Mansfield, Patrick White and D.H. Lawrence, as well as commencing her lifelong love affair with the writings and life of Virginia Woolf that was to result in The Jessamy Brides and The Letters.

It was while in Philadelphia that Joanne Trautmann (as she became after marriage) developed her fondness for a good cigar. Years later, she recalled with glee that "when I first moved to Drexel I was assigned to share an office with an elderly male colleague who had specifically requested that 'one of the new women be put in with me as I cannot abide to share with a man; they all smoke'. Imagine his surprise!"

In 1972 Trautmann's career took an unexpected turn. George Harrell, the founder Dean of the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, decided that his should be the first school to have a fully fledged department of humanities and, moreover, he had the money to hire those he considered the best. He asked Trautmann to start a programme that would bring literary knowledge, skill and understanding to bear on the teaching of medical students and after much soul-searching she agreed.

With the move to Hershey, Trautmann's life changed radically. While still working on Woolf's letters with Nicolson and lecturing undergraduates, she began developing courses of study designed to use literature to teach students to become better doctors. In doing so, she not only sought out literary examples of medical encounters, developing with Carol Pollard the first annotated bibliography of such texts, Literature and Medicine (1975), but also found herself, along with a small handful of others like her, developing a field of scholarship; a new, literary critical way of viewing and indeed understanding the ways in which doctors and patients interact, and the settings in which they do so.

Despite the fame brought by the Virginia Woolf Letters, and indeed by her own collection, Congenial Spirits (1989), the decade from 1972 proved to be the most influential and fruitful of Trautmann's life. By 1983, when she married Sam Banks, himself a leading light in the medical humanities, "L&M", as some were beginning to call it, had become an established discipline with a network of scholar-teachers spread across the universe of American medical schools. Joanne later recalled that "a well-known wag, upon hearing of our union and knowing of our early interest in literature and medicine, quipped 'I see that the father has married the mother of our field. Does this mean that we are now legitimate?'" It did. She with a few others had changed the face of medical education.

In 1986 Joanne left Hershey to go with Sam first to Virginia and, after he retired, to his home state of Florida, but she never stopped writing, teaching and lecturing; often returning to the English writers that she loved so much. Neither Sam's death in 2000 nor the onset a few years later of the ovarian cancer that killed her really slowed her down. She continued to travel, see friends, enjoy a glass of wine and of course smoke the occasional cigar.

In his memoirs, Long Life, Nigel Nicolson recalled the black-haired, eager, scholarly and merry girl that he had met in 1971. That, and her joy in living, is how she will be remembered.

Ross Kessel