Elisabeth Murray

Katherine Maud Elisabeth Murray (1909-98), educationalist and biographer

Elisabeth Murray was the granddaughter and biographer of James Murray. Her celebrated book, Caught in the Web of Words, is the most complete account of the life and work of the chief editor of the Oxford Dictionary. Its Japanese translator deemed it 'One of the most frequently quoted and referenced volumes in the fields of lexicography, history of the English language, and general linguistics...[one cannot] deal with these topics without making reference to her work.' Eminently readable, it achieved acclaim and popularity among a more general audience and was thought by Anthony Burgess to be 'one of the finest biographies of the twentieth century' (as quoted on the cover of the paperback edition).

Born near Cambridge, Elisabeth Murray read Modern History at Somerville College, Oxford and went on to write her BLitt dissertation on the constitutional history of the Cinque Ports. Having gained two notable scholarships and worked as a research fellow at Somerville, she found her vocation in academic administration. She was appointed Assistant Tutor and Registrar at Girton College, Cambridge, in 1938, then Domestic Bursar and finally Junior Bursar in 1942-48. She then moved to become Principal of Bishop Otter College in Chichester, a women's teacher training institution. Under her leadership, which lasted 22 years, the college doubled in size and became co-educational; she was much lauded and is fondly remembered there for her efficient administration.

Upon retirement in 1970, she turned her great energy to creating her magnificent biography of J. A. H. Murray, transforming relatives' memories, verbal accounts, photographs, genealogical research, two amateur biographies (one by her father and one by her uncle Wilfrid) and the many letters in her possession (the latter donated to the Bodleian Library after her death), into a coherent narrative. Completed in just five years, the book shows her 'mastery of this voluminous material...[which] was the decisive quality of her research' (Foster 1998: 28).

She barely remembered her 'Grandfather Dictionary'. In her book's prologue she reports a childhood memory of him walking in a procession beside Thomas Hardy (whose identity she did not realize at the time), in order to receive an honorary degree in Cambridge. She also remembers the discomfort (due to his tickly beard) of being made to kiss him at age five. Her grandfather strongly expressed his dislike of biography ('it is one of the hateful characteristics of a degenerate age, that the idle world will not let the worker alone...but must insist on turning him inside out') and Elisabeth Murray hoped that he would have felt differently about one written posthumously. She paints vividly a dedicated, energetic scholar – some of whose characteristics are recognizable in the tributes paid to Elisabeth Murray on her death. Of this 'remote patriarchal figure', she writes, 'I am constantly surprised to recognise in his character and interests traits which I had thought peculiar to myself but now find to be inherited' (K. M. E. Murray 1977.

Caught in the Web of Words was published in 1977 by Yale University Press, Oxford University Press having refused it for being too much a personal account of James Murray and not enough an institutional record of the Dictionary (Foster 1998: 28) or, possibly, because it favoured her grandfather in its descriptions of the many tussles between the Dictionary's editors and the OUP Delegates. From the battle to get her book published, she may have gained further sympathy with James Murray's life, which is captured so vibrantly in her 'tale of "the intolerable wrestle / with words and meanings", a tale of trial and triumph'.