[Vwoolf] Jean Kennard

[Katherine Hill-Miller]

What a wonderful tribute, Matthew!  Thanks so very much for this warm reminder of the impact we just might have on our students—especially since it comes just as the semester is about to end and we’re about to say “good bye” to them….


Kathy Hill-Miller

From: Vwoolf [mailto:vwoolf-bounces at lists.osu.edu] On Behalf Of Matthew Cheney
Sent: Saturday, April 22, 2017 12:35 PM
To: vwoolf at lists.osu.edu
Subject: [Vwoolf] Jean Kennard

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

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Matthew Cheney
macheney at wildcats.unh.edu<mailto:macheney at wildcats.unh.edu>
mcheney at gmail.com<mailto: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
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