Annie Barnes

Dynamic teacher and Pascal scholar

Annie Madeleine Sessely, French scholar: born Geneva 15 April 1903; Tutor, St Anne's Society (from 1952 St Anne's College), Oxford 1947-70, Fellow 1952-70, Honorary Fellow 1971-2003; Reader in French Literature, Oxford University 1966-70; married 1929 Roger Barnes (died 1967); died Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire 17 January 2003.

Annie Barnes was a scholar of international renown: her research on Pascal earned her standing ovations at Pascalian conferences in Paris, while her wider studies of Jansenism and the Port-Royal brought further acclaim.

Although much of her work centred on 17th-century French writers, Goethe, Proust and other later masters came under her scrutiny and publications followed. After her retirement as a professorial fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford, in 1970, the award of a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship allowed her to continue work on Pascal. Well into her eighties, she continued to present research on the late 19th-century religious writer Charles Péguy at the colloques given in his name.

She was born Annie Sessely of Swiss Protestant parents in Geneva in 1903, and educated there and in Berne. Her doctoral thesis for Berne University, "L'Influence de Shakespeare sur Alfred de Vigny", became, in 1928, the first of a substantial body of published work throughout her life.

Within a few years of receiving her doctorate in 1927, she was to make crucial decisions: her marriage in 1929 to H.G. ("Roger") Barnes, an English visiting lecturer (docent) at Berne, and her conversion to Roman Catholicism. Annie apparently initiated the idea of the marriage herself, but it was Roger who started them both on the road to a profound Catholic faith. This did not prevent them from having a wide circle of friends with diverse interests and beliefs, among them musicians and composers, such as Jean Langlais, whose Virgo Maria was played at her funeral. Asked later in life why she had not become a nun, she replied: "Men . . . I liked men too much."

After Berne the Barnes' work in different European universities in the 1930s made for a peripatetic life: moving between Oxford and Tübingen, Annie first studied at Somerville, then spent two years as a Senior Scholar at Lady Margaret Hall with some teaching of French, while Roger lectured at Tübingen University and prepared his doctoral thesis on Byron in Germany. Roger's appointment as lecturer in German at Swansea brought them back to Britain, where Annie completed her Oxford doctorate on "Jean Leclerc, 1657-1736, et la République des Lettres" in 1935. This work on the controversial theologian, follower of Jacobus Arminius, was published in 1938.

She spent the years of the Second World War teaching at Lady Margaret Hall while Roger, now university lecturer at Oxford (later Fellow at St Edmund Hall), worked some of the time at the BBC and they gave a home to two boys evacuated for the duration.

In 1947 Annie Barnes was appointed Tutor in French at St Anne's Society and, on its becoming St Anne's College in 1952, one of the new college's first Fellows. One of a group of strong and charismatic intellects teaching at St Anne's in the 1950s (among them Iris Murdoch, Jennifer Hart and Peter Ady), Barnes demanded – and got – the best efforts her pupils were capable of: she combined her prodigious Pascalian researches with dynamic teaching, and without any sign of the tension and fatigue that can mar a don's working life and a pupil's amour propre.

The substance of an undergraduate essay would be pared to the bone, only to be reassembled benignly under her ardent and incisive guidance. By the end of a tutorial there was a force of revelation and a clarity of thought to build on: we had travelled. Recalling Pascal's inspired metaphor of man as the thinking reed (le roseau pensant), those hours in pursuit of enlightenment in Barnes's wake endure for all her students: "Toute notre dignité consiste donc en la pensée . . . Travaillons donc à BIEN PENSER."

An article appearing in French Studies in 1954 on the authenticity of the table of titles in Pascal's Copie des Pensées brought Barnes into contact with Louis Lafuma and other distinguished Pascal scholars. Invitations followed, and other friendships were made, notably with Jean Orcibal, who published her edition with commentary of the Jansenist "manuscrit de Munich" as volume 4 of his series Les Origines du Jansénisme in 1962.

This was something of a scholastic coup: the manuscript consisted of 135 hitherto unpublished and unedited letters from a friend of Jansenius, the Abbé de Saint-Cyran (Jean Duvergier de Hauranne) to all manner of recipients. They had studied together St Augustine's writings and embraced his doctrine of predestination and election – fundamental tenets of faith for the Port-Royal theologians – and the Abbé paid dearly for his Augustinian convictions: Cardinal Richelieu sent him to prison in 1638.

In 1966, the year before her husband's death, Barnes was appointed University Reader in French Literature. She became an Honorary Fellow of St Anne's after retirement in 1970, and the Leverhulme award of 1973-75 enabled further research on Pascal and Péguy. Her lectures were finally published as "Le Dialogue avec Pascal: Proust – Péguy – Valéry" by the Courrier du Centre International Blaise Pascal in 1993.

Annie Barnes remained dynamic and full of joy throughout her long life, while carrying on many dialogues over the years with Catholic scholars from both monastic and lay backgrounds. She developed deep and lasting friendships amongst the Benedictine monks at Prinknash Abbey, four of whom said Mass for her at her funeral. When she could no longer leave her cottage at Chadlington, she would say the daily office at home: she told how, on one occasion only, she had experienced the beatific vision with her cat Bella, electrified, beside her.

Visitors to Chadlington in later years were assured of her acute perception, jokes – sometimes decades old and disconcertingly about oneself – and, often, controversy, but always warmed by the ardent heart within.

Antonia Robinson