A shock was felt across the Victorian Studies world when we learned that a leading scholar (and my PhD supervisor), Prof. Rosemary Mitchell, passed away on Monday evening.

As you can imagine the news has come as quite a shock to her friends and former students (and her former students, myself included, counted her among their close friends).

The author of numerous scholarly articles and the monograph Picturing the Past, Rosemary was truly a leading scholar. Having retired from Leeds Trinity University in 2019, she then retrained to serve in the Church of England and was due to take up a post as a deacon at a church in Skipton, Yorkshire, but her illness and death prevented this.

In addition to knowing her through her scholarship, people also knew her as the kind-hearted professor who, at conferences, was always smiling and nodding along, and as someone who was ever willing to help if you got in touch with her. 

There have already been many tributes to Rosemary from many quarters of social media and I link here an obituary for her written by Prof. Rohan McWilliam (ARU). At present, I do not think I can gather my own thoughts to do Rosemary’s memory justice but I promise I shall write a more thorough notice of her later.

Stephen Basdeo