Professor Julia Briggs

Julia Ruth Ballam, literary scholar and biographer: born London 30 December 1943; Fellow and Tutor in English, Hertford College, Oxford 1978-95; Professor of English Literature and Women's Studies, De Montfort University 1995-2007; OBE 2005; married 1964 Peter Gold (one son; marriage dissolved), 1969 Robin Briggs (two sons; marriage dissolved); died London 16 August 2007.

Julia Briggs helped to change the ways in which English literature is presented and taught in British universities. The 1970s women's movement managed to bring Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft and, later, Virginia Woolf, into the canon of acknowledged great writers, but Briggs, besides helping to lead that change, also championed other branches of literature previously disdained, notably works written for children.

She was born Julia Ruth Ballam in north London in 1943. Her father, whom the Second World War had taken to India with the RAF, was an executive in the advertising industry - he put the lion on the British egg. Her mother had been a commercial artist before her marriage. Julia was educated at South Hampstead High School, from where she won a scholarship to St Hilda's College, Oxford, to study English Literature. After her father died in 1961, the family had few luxuries and Julia's mother was later to live with Julia's own family until her death a few years ago.

In 1964, Julia Ballam was the first female student not to be expelled from Oxford for becoming pregnant. The college authorities - all colleges were then single sex - did, however, as a public expression of their - double standards - disapproval, strip her of her scholarship and brought out their shotgun. Julia was married to the father, who, as he told her in a letter from South America, soon turned his attentions elsewhere.

Julia was rescued, with her child, by Robin Briggs, a young historian, a Fellow of All Souls College and a man with an appealing innocence, obvious integrity and a power-blue sports car. They were married as soon as the divorce was completed. Somehow, despite the responsibilities of motherhood, Julia completed her degrees and began an academic career.

After temporary teaching appointments at Buckland College (preparing students for London external degrees) and at the Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University), Julia Briggs was appointed to a permanent post in Oxford University as Fellow of Hertford College. She soon established herself there as a hard-working, conscientious and successful tutor, adored by her students, and also as an organiser - leading, for example, the English Faculty triumphantly through the first Research Assessment Exercise and introducing women's studies as an integral part of the curriculum.

Briggs's first published book, Night Visitors: the rise and fall of the English ghost story (1977), already showed what was to come. Wide-ranging, learned and invitingly written, it was on a subject not then regarded as worth academic attention - Oxford would not allow it as a doctoral subject - and it dealt with the dreams, fears and desires of the unconscious mind. This Stage-Play World: texts and contexts 1580-1625 (1983, revised 1997) presents the great plays and writings of the Elizabethan and Jacobean era as part of a society and a culture dominated by religion and fear.

With her highly acclaimed A Woman of Passion: the life of E. Nesbit (1987), Briggs turned to biography. The author of The Railway Children, a woman author who had presented herself to the purchasers of her children's books as a reliable aunt-like figure, had actually led a tempestuous bohemian private life of misery as well as joy. The late Doris Langley Moore, who had known Nesbit, had a policy of refusing all requests, and it took months of cajoling before she relaxed her rule. Once they met, the two women instantly became friends, the boxes in Moore's house were searched for the old papers and A Woman of Passion became possible.

By the early 1990s, with the coming out of copyright of Virginia Woolf's printed works, the publication of her diaries, letters, and the collecting of her voluminous essays, the way was opened for a full reappraisal. Briggs, besides editing the Penguin series, embarked on an ambitious biography that brought Woolf's own insights on life-writing to bear on the problem of how to present the whole self, not just external events but the unconscious as well as the conscious mind, in literary form.

However, in 1994, Briggs was unexpectedly denied the prestigious G.M. Young lectureship at Hertford College in favour of the poet Tom Paulin. Since a few years previously Paulin had made a television programme as part of the J'Accuse series, in which he described Woolf as "one of the most over-rated literary figures of the 20th century", Briggs felt deeply hurt, her academic work again snubbed.

It was something of a relief when, in 1995, she was invited to become Professor of Literature and Women's Studies at De Montfort University in Leicester, a position which offered what she then most needed - time. Virginia Woolf: an inner life, which reversed the normal biographical convention by presenting the woman through her writings, was published in 2005. But although the book was enthusiastically received, by then many potential readers felt that they already knew enough from previous biographies.

Julia Briggs was darkly Jewish in appearance. At a time when some women academics thought they had to be dowdy to be intellectual, she was unostentatiously stylish - a quick trip to pick up the dry-cleaning could include a detour to Designing Woman. Although she did not, as some thought, "walk unaware of her own increasing beauty", she did not exploit it in any obvious way. Her openness extended to everyone, woman or man, who had her friendship - indeed she had little regard for hierarchies and boundaries. When her students were depressed, she was there, far beyond any professional duty, and when she herself needed emotional support, she relied on them.

Briggs was lavish with her time. Family and friends who had come a distance might see the whole afternoon lost to a phone call from a stranger. Like the women authors she wrote about, Julia Briggs found it hard to reconcile her inner life with the norms of the society in which she lived. For years she was in love with a man whose power over her she understood clearly with one part of her mind. Although she lived with him in the family house after Robin Briggs forced a choice and a divorce, he was, she eventually concluded in a typical phrase, "thin" - lacking in any real substance outside her mind.

The breast cancer that struck in 1999 appeared to have been defeated - although when Julia's hair grew back in, it was curly. But when a brain tumour was recently diagnosed, it was time to arrange her exit. Without her hair, Julia was as beautiful as ever, and was able, for a while, to talk with an openness and honesty extraordinary even for her. It was a precious interval. The people of her "stage-play world" would have called it grace.

William St Clair