DORIS AURELIA RUSSELL
1902 - 1962
Doris Aurelia Russell joined the Vassar Faculty in September
1940 as an instructor in English. She died on April 24, 1962,
Professor of English and Chairman of the English Department.
In the twenty-two years of her connection with the college
she was recognized as a superb teacher, a tactful administrator,
and as a scholar whose scholarship informed all her thinking and
whose personal warmth suffused all her scholarship.
She was born in New York in 1902, and received her education
at Ashley Hall in Charleston, South Carolina, Smith College,
Bryn Mawr College and Columbia University. After graduating
from Smith she taught in Denver and, from 1930 to 1933, at the
Peking American School and the National Tsing Hua University.
She came to Vassar from the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, where
she had been sought out by the English Department in its quest
for the kind of teacher whose concern was equally with the
matters to be taught and with the minds and interests of those
who were to learn. She continued her contact with the school-
world by representing Vassar for a number-of years on the School
and College Conference on English and by serving as Assistant
Dean from 1952 to 1955.
In her tribute to Miss Helen Young, the brilliant teacher with
whom she had worked at the Shipley School, Doris Russell wrote
of Miss Young's "deep respect for her students as individuals...
She had a very keen awareness of their lives outside the class-
room and of the realities for which they were being prepared.
She knew that their hours in English classes were brief and
numbered, but also that if they were rightly spent they could
last for a life time. There was not a moment to be wasted and
the needs of all kinds of temperaments and abilities were given
serious attention." This awareness Doris herself had in the
highest degree. It won her the devotion of students of all
kinds and spurred them to varied excellence. She regarded each
student, however, capricious or undedicated, as a significant
individual, but she saw beyond the persons to the historical
moment and constantly called them to realize the quality of that
moment. "Certainly one of the purposes of your kind of educa-
tion is to intensify your awareness of the physical and social
structure which surrounds and shapes your individual lives,"
she said in her 1958 Convocation Address.
Her sense of the reciprocal character of "individual" and
"society" showed also in her scholarship. She was deeply inter-
ested in the theatre - perhaps the most "social" of the arts.
She wrote her doctor's dissertation on John Dryden, satirist
DORIS AURELIA RUSSELL (Continued)
and playwirght. When she went to England in 1956-57 with a plan
to study the friendships of John Donne, that plan came to focus
on the question of literary patronage and the Countess of Bedford -
that is, on the means by which society sponsored literature and
on the role of a wealthy woman in that sponsoring.
Friendship came naturally to Doris Russell, and persisted
through life. She had friends in every group that she lived
and worked with including the China group with whom she
shared the exciting youthful years in Peking, the English
group whom she knew during her periods of research in Cambridge,
her colleagues in the administration of the Woodrow Wilson
Foundation for which she served as regional comittee member
from l957. Her hospitality was gracious and abundant; she
lived among lovely things and she invited all her friends to
enjoy them with her. A colleague of ten years ago wrote after
her death:
"I knew she cared deeply about her studies and
her students and Vassar - yet there was another
world she seemed to bring with her too - of
households and 'family' and feminine fulfillments.
I prized this much."
She fully and constantly recognized the tragedies of existence-
she carried exceptional burdens in her personal life - but
she faced them with a superb energy and instinctive optimism
that gave her the power to live valiantly and gaily from day
to day. Such courage and such buoyancy did not come merely
from "character": her intellect played widely and wittily
over the field of literature, not superficially, not pedanti-
cally. She could not let her subject alone; she wanted nothing
more than she wanted her "job" - which was, to mediate between
the great works of writing and the minds of college students.
To her, the work of art, however, abstract, was still plainly
about how people experienced life. She made Edmund Spenser
vital to her classes because she understood The Faerie Queene
as a serious analysis of the Nature of Things, as a real story
of the many aspects of love and of the involvement of real
people in real politics.
In the last two years of her life she served as Chairman of the
Intra-Mural Events Comittee for the Vassar Centennial and as
Chairman of the English Department, and she taught her courses with
renewed freshness; her intellect, her affections, her social involve-
ment were unquenchable. Her friend, I. A. Richards, wrote recently
to a close friend at Vassar: "Yes, we often find ourselves thinking
of Doris. It is a most sustaining thing to do."
Caroline G. Mercer
XVI 65'66 Barbara Swain
Vernon Venable