ESC: English Studies in Canada

Lorne Macdonald, a long-time member of accute and of the Editorial Advisory Board of English Studies in Canada, died in Calgary on 14 January 2010 following a brief illness. Educated at the University of London and the University of Toronto, Lorne was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia before joining the Department of English at the University of Calgary in 1991. A devoted teacher, a principled colleague, a meticulous scholar, and a valued friend, he will be missed by friends, colleagues, and students at the University of Calgary and at other universities in Canada and abroad.

Lorne was a voracious reader and a fine writer and scholar. Students remember him for his encyclopedic knowledge and his kindness—as well as for his ability to call the roll by memory at the first class of each term! A respected scholar of British literature of the Romantic period, he was internationally recognized as a biographer and as a textual editor. At the time of his death he was working on an ambitious monograph entitled “Geneva in 1816: A Group Biography,” a study of Lord Byron, Claire Clairmont, Matthew Gregory Lewis, John William Polidori, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Shelley), and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He published biographies of Polidori (Poor Polidori: A Critical Biography of the Author of “The Vampyre,” 1991) [End Page i] and of Matthew Gregory Lewis (Monk Lewis: A Critical Biography, 2000). His highly successful edition of Frankenstein (with Kathleen Scherf) provided Broadview Press with the template for the entire Broadview Editions series; editions of Wollstonecraft’s Vindications, Lewis’s The Monk, and Polidori’s “The Vampyre” and “Ernestus Berchtold” (the latter based on an earlier University of Toronto Press edition) followed. A fine edition of Charlotte Smith’s monumental last novel, Letters of a Solitary Wanderer, appeared from Pickering and Chatto in 2007. For many years Lorne had also been working with Anne McWhir on The Broadview Anthology of Literature of the Revolutionary Period, due to appear this month.

A gathering in Lorne’s honour was held at the University of Calgary on what would have been his fifty-fifth birthday, 24 February 2010. A memorial service will be held at St Stephen’s-on-the-Hill United Church, Mississauga, on Saturday, 24 April 2010. [End Page ii]