Phyllis Hartnoll (1906–1997)

Phyllis Hartnoll was born in Egypt, the daughter of a British army officer. She was sent to England to stay with relatives and be educated at a convent school and Cheltenham Ladies' College. She read English at St. Hugh's College, Oxford University, where she won the Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1929, and continued her studies at the Universities of Lyons and Algiers. From 1929 to 1967, she worked as a reader, translator, and book editor for Macmillan publishing house. A noted linguist, in addition to learning Latin, and Greek, she was fluent in French and German, and was able to converse in Italian, Swedish, Hebrew, and Arabic. She conceived the idea of a first-of-its-kind theater history/guide in the 1930s, and became a founder member of the Society for Theatre Research in 1948; the other founders contributed to her book The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, the first edition of which appeared in 1951.
It became a bestseller and is still accepted as the standard reference work in the field. She also wrote A Concise History of the Theatre in 1968 and several other works such as Plays and Players (1984) and Who's Who in Shaw (1975). She also taught theater history in the 1950s at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Phyllis also was a poet, and a collection of her verses, The Maid's Song and other Poems, was published in 1938. She wrote an introduction to Percy Bysshe Shelley's gothic novel Zastrozzi, which was republished by the Golden Cockerel Press in 1955.