[Vwoolf] Jean Kennard

[Matthew Cheney]

Hello Woolfians,

I was recently reading an essay of Jean Kennard's, and I remembered that
Prof. Kennard died in April of 2016 and I don't recall a notice of it here.
I was her student many years ago, and I owe much of my passion for Woolf to
her, so I hope you won't mind if I say a few words in her memory.

First, here is her official obituary from the University of New Hampshire,
where she was the first person to teach a course on women's literature, the
first woman to be chair of the English Department, and the first female
full professor in the department:
http://cola.unh.edu/article/2016/04/passing-jean-kennard-professor-emerita

I can't help writing about Prof. Kennard in personal terms, though I hope
not solipsistically. We only encountered each other for one semester, but
it really is not an exaggeration to say her seminar changed my life. I
regret that I never got a chance to tell her that.

I took Prof. Kennard's seminar on Woolf in the spring of 1998, when I was
finishing my senior year at UNH, having transferred there only one term
earlier from NYU (it's a long story, mostly involving money and my parents'
divorce). The previous summer, I had volunteered at the Woolf Conference in
my hometown at Plymouth State College, which Jeanne Dubino organized.
Having had such a wonderful experience there -- I felt welcomed by the
Woolf community at a difficult moment of my life in a way I've never
forgotten -- I eagerly signed up for Prof. Kennard's seminar. It proved to
be both one of the most challenging and rewarding courses I ever took,
undergrad or grad. We read all of the novels except *Night and Day*, plus
*Room*, *Three Guineas*, and the essays in Michèle Barrett's *Women &
Writing* collection. I remember being so exhausted from reading that I
could hardly keep up with my other classes, but it was also a profoundly
fulfilling exhaustion, because reading such a large volume of Woolf made
her words and images feel like a presence in my life, a sort of companion.

I was the only male in the course, which perplexed and even angered some of
the students, at least one of whom saw me as an interloper, but it only got
commented on openly toward the end of the course, when for some reason we
were discussing how and why certain writers get seen as "for" certain
readers -- why, Prof. Kennard asked, might it be that only one man signed
up for the course? We talked about other writers (I remember Alice Walker's
name coming up, and I said I also loved a lot of her work, which just
proved to the other students, I suppose, what a gender anomaly I was!) and
about how we as readers find our way into different types of texts. Why are
we attracted to certain writers and not others? How do our gender
expectations affect our reading? How are we situated within our experiences
as people and readers? The ideas from that conversation stuck with me and
affected a lot of my later academic work.

My term paper was, if I remember correctly, on Woolf and pacifism. What I
remember vividly is Prof. Kennard's feedback on the paper: She liked it,
but thought perhaps it could use a little bit less history and a little bit
more literary analysis. For whatever reason, that feedback led to an
epiphany I probably should have had earlier: That literary history and
literary analysis are not necessarily the same thing (and that, left on my
own, I'll always veer more toward literary history than analysis).

After the seminar, I didn't keep in contact with Prof. Kennard, though I
did thank her at the end of the course for making Woolf so vivid and
accessible in a way that didn't feel simplifying. Life took me elsewhere,
but Woolf remained a constant companion.

And then life brought me back to old haunts. By the time I returned to UNH
to work on my doctorate, Jean Kennard was retired, as were most of the
faculty I'd known as an undergrad. But Woolf was still with me, and has
become a third of my dissertation, which is supervised by Prof. Kennard's
successor, Robin Hackett.

Working on Woolf material a year or so ago, I suddenly needed some
secondary sources on Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby. I visited the
library and took a book off the shelf: *Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby:
A Working Partnership*. The writer? Jean Kennard. It was one of the most
pleasant shocks of my life to discover that she was the author of a book
that would prove quite useful to me.

I wish we had had a chance to talk about Brittain and Holtby, about Woolf
in the '30s, about all sorts of other things that have become obsessions of
mine over the years, the seeds of which she helped to plant. Such is the
fate of great teachers, though: Their influence may be unsung. The
influence remains, though, it lives on, it matters.

"He felt her feeling now; it was not about him; it was about other people;
about another world, a new world. . . ." —*The Years*

---------------------------------------
Matthew Cheney
macheney at wildcats.unh.edu
mcheney at gmail.com

Ph.D. Candidate in Literature
University of New Hampshire
Department of English
113 Conant Hall
10 Library Way
Durham, NH 03824-2537
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/vwoolf/attachments/20170422/407c172b/attachment.html>