LILIAN HAMILTON JEFFERY

1915-1986

8. Study at Princeton and Return to Oxford

The Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton

The thesis completed, she went off to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, with an office in a hastily cleared basement storeroom. This was a relatively relaxed period which she used to broaden her interests again. She found time to attend Harold Cherniss's famous Pindar class, but, from next door, I do not remember getting much help with my early struggles with classical Attic lettering, and she disappeared quite frequently to renew American friendships from Athens and the war.

LHJ's Office at the Institute

Back in Oxford and starting as a tutor, she had a long period of activity on which she thrived. Changing the thesis into a book demanded detailed attention, quite apart from the problems of financing and producing it. Articles continued to appear, some epigraphic, some pretty purely historical. She felt the need to give attention to some pretty arid fields, such as what the Greeks themselves had thought about the origin of writing. One paper given to the Oxford Philological Society, on the scholiasts to Dionysius Thrax, is memorable, not so much for its content, but for its being almost drowned in one corner of the room by the noise of a visitor (from an institution notorious for its attitude to women) saying, over and over again: 'Gee, what a pity! Such a pretty girl! What a pity!'