M. C. Bradbrook (1909–1993)

M.C. (Muriel Clara) Bradbrook was educated at Hutcheson’s Girls’ School, Glasgow, and Oldershaw High School (now The Oldershaw Academy) in Wallasey, England. In 1927, she entered Cambridge University, Girton College, where she read English and graduated with First Class honors. She remained at Girton as a Carlisle Scholar, and later as an Ottilie Hancock Research Fellow, and earned her PhD in 1933. In 1936, after a year at Oxford University, she return to Girton College and joined the faculty as Lecturer in English and Fellow. She rose to become the first woman professor of English at Cambridge University. During World War II, she worked in in London for the Board of Trade, and in the 1950s was a scholar-in-residence at the Folger Library in Washington, D.C., and at the Huntington Library in California. She published some 17 books on Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, as well as influential literary criticism on authors including Ibsen and Conrad. Two of her most acclaimed books were The Rise of the Common Player (1962) and Shakespeare the Craftsman (1969). She served as Mistress of Girton in 1968-1976, and also wrote a history of the college, That Infidel Place (1969).