Dorothy Blair
Dorothy Sara Blair, nee Greene was an English scholar and translator of Francophone African literature.
Life
Dorothy Greene was born in Birmingham, England. She studied French at Royal Holloway, University of London, then taught for a period at North [London Collegiate School] in London. In 1939, she married Maurice Blair, and in 1941 the family moved, first to Rhodesia as it then was, and then to South Africa. She was a university lecturer at the University of Cape Town, before moving to Johannesburg, where she joined the Department of Romance Languages at the University of the Witwatersrand as French lecturer, eventually becoming professor. She served as a trustee for The Classic, a literary magazine created by Nat Nakasa in Johannesburg, alongside Nadine Gordimer, Julian Beinart, Nimrod Mkele, and others. On retirement, Blair returned to England, living in Brighton and carrying out freelance literary translation from French.Her papers are held at the University of Westminster.