Christina Colvin
{{Short description|British literary scholar and historian}}
{{Use British English|date=April 2021}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=April 2021}}
Christina Colvin, Lady Colvin (née Butler; 20 January 1919, Oxford – 7 August 2003, Oxford) was a British literary scholar and historian of Oxfordshire. She won the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 1973.
Life
Christina Edgeworth Butler was born in 1919 in Oxford, into a family of academic pedigree. Her father, H. E. Butler, was a Latinist; her aunts Ruth and Violet were fellows of St Anne's College, Oxford; and both her grandfathers were Oxford dons. She attended St Paul's Girls School and University College, London. She married Howard Colvin, an architectural historian, in 1943, and moved to Oxford when he took up a faculty position at St John's College.{{cite news|newspaper=The Oxford Mail|url=https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/6573159.lady-christina-colvin/|date=August 23, 2003|title=Lady Christina Colvin|access-date=5 April 2021}}{{cite encyclopedia|encyclopedia=Dictionary of Art Historians|title=Colvin, Howard Montagu|url=https://arthistorians.info/colvinh|first1=Lee|last1=Sorensen|first2= Emily|last2=Crockett|date=21 February 2018 |access-date=5 April 2021}}
From 1953, Colvin worked on several volumes of the Oxfordshire issues of the Victoria County History. She contributed to the topics of poor relief and religious nonconformity in volume 14, on the Bampton Hundred.{{cite encyclopedia|year=2004|title=Bampton Hundred (Part Two)|encyclopedia=Victoria County History: A History of the County of Oxford|publisher=University of London|location=London|url=https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/oxon/vol14/xiii-xiv|access-date=5 April 2021|volume=14|pages=xiii-xiv}} She was a co-author of volumes 10–13.{{cite encyclopedia|encyclopedia=A History of the County of Oxford|volume=10|title=Banbury Hundred|year=1972|url=https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/oxon/vol10|publisher=Victoria County History|location=London|access-date=5 April 2021}}{{cite encyclopedia|encyclopedia=A History of the County of Oxford|volume=11|title=Wootton Hundred (Northern Part)|year=1983|url=https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/oxon/vol11|publisher=Victoria County History|location=London|access-date=5 April 2021}}{{cite encyclopedia|encyclopedia=A History of the County of Oxford|volume=12|title=Wootton Hundred (South) Including Woodstock |year=1990|url=https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/oxon/vol12|publisher=Victoria County History|location=London|access-date=5 April 2021}}{{cite encyclopedia|encyclopedia=A History of the County of Oxford|volume=13|title=Bampton Hundred (Part One) |year=1996|url=https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/oxon/vol13|publisher=Victoria County History|location=London|access-date=5 April 2021}}
Colvin also edited two volumes of the letters of Maria Edgeworth, who was her great-great-aunt. The papers, on loan from Dublin, were at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and she worked with her sister-in-law Marilyn Butler in preparing them for publication. She won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 1973 for Maria Edgeworth: Letters from England, 1813–1844, while Butler won for Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography.{{cite book|title=Sultan of Swing: The Life of David Butler|first=Michael|last=Crick|page=|publisher=Biteback Publishing|year=2018 |isbn=9781785904394}} Edgeworth's descendants were known to have destroyed or amended several documents of Edgeworth's, but Colvin was able to restore them from later manuscripts.{{cite news|newspaper=The Times|date=January 7, 1980|first=Brian|last=Alderson|title=Resilient rivals to the Austen archive|page=9}}
Selected works
- {{cite book|title=Maria Edgeworth: Letters from England, 1813–1844|year=1971|publisher=Oxford University}}
- {{cite book|title=Maria Edgeworth in France and Switzerland|year=1979|publisher=Clarendon|location=Oxford}}
References
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Category:Alumni of University College London
Category:20th-century English historians