Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, 1894–1981, American educator, b. Yonkers, N.Y., grad. Univ. of Michigan (B.A., 1914; M.A., 1918) and Yale (Ph.D., 1920). She was dean and professor at Smith from 1929 to 1941, when she became the first woman professor on the graduate faculties of Columbia. She remained there until 1962, serving her last eight years as chairman of the graduate department of English and Comparative Literature. In 1940 she became the first woman president of Phi Beta Kappa, and in 1963 served as president of the Modern Language Association of America. An authority on 17th-century literature and thought, she was the author of the prize–winning Newton Demands the Muse (1946), The Breaking of the Circle (1950), Science and Imagination (1956), Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (1959), A Reader's Guide to Milton (1963), Pepys' Diary and the New Science (1965), and This Long Disease, My Life (1968).
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