Rickert, Edith, 1871-1938

Writer. Professor of English, University of Chicago, 1924-1935.

Epithet: Dr Chaucerian scholar at Chicago University

Edith Rickert was born in Canal Dover, Ohio, in 1871. She received an A.B. from Vassar College in 1891 and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago in 1899. From 1897 to 1900, while completing her dissertation, a study of the Middle English romance Emare, she returned to Vassar as an instructor in English.

In 1900, Rickert left the United States for nine years of study, travel, and writing in England and on the Continent. During this period of her life, she edited several medieval texts, prepared translations of medieval literature, published five novels including The Reaper (1904), Folly (1906), and The Golden Hawk (1907), and wrote more than eighty short stories, fifty of which were published in British and American magazines. In 1909, Rickert returned to the United States and settled in Boston, where for several years she was an editor with D. C. Heath and the Ladies' Home Journal. With the onset of American involvement in World War I, she moved to Washington, D.C. and assumed a position as cryptographer in the War Department, working with John Matthews Manly, a Professor of English at the University of Chicago who had taken a leave of absence to serve as a captain in the military intelligence section. After the War, Rickert and Manly collaborated on The Writing of English (1919), Contemporary British Literature (1921), Contemporary American Literature (1922), and several other popular textbooks. In 1924, Rickert joined the faculty of the University of Chicago as Associate Professor of English; she was appointed Professor of English in 1930 and remained on the faculty until her retirement in 1935.

Rickert's career at the University was devoted largely to the extensive project undertaken with Manly to compile a definitive critical edition of the Canterbury Tales. Beginning in 1930, Rickert and Manly spent part of each year in England tracing manuscripts of the Tales, researching the details of Chaucer's life, and supervising a staff of workers employed at the Public Records Office in London. The remainder of each year was spent in Chicago, where Rickert taught courses in medieval and modern literature and continued her professional publications, the most notable of which was New Methods for the Study of Literature (1927). She also completed three volumes of children's stories and a final novel, Severn Woods (1930).

Rickert died in Chicago in 1938. The eight-volume product of her long association with Manly, The Text of the Canterbury Tales, appeared in its final form in 1940, several months before Manly's own death. Rickert's anthology of material illustrating fourteenth-century English life, Chaucer's World, was edited by two former students and published in 1948.