Eliza Marian Butler
Eliza Marian Butler, was an English linguist, academic, and scholar of German who successively held two prestigious endowed professorships: the Henry Simon Chair in German at University of Manchester; and the Schröder Professor of German at the University of Cambridge. She was the first woman ever appointed to either of these chairs. Controversial when first published, and banned in Germany, her 1935 book The Tyranny of Greece over Germany, became a classic of German cultural analysis in the English-speaking world after the Second World War. In addition to academic works, published as E. M. Butler and Elizabeth M. Butler, she published two novels and a memoir.
Early life
Eliza Butler, known as "Elsie", was born in Bardsea, Lancashire, to a family of Anglo-Irish ancestry. She was educated by a Norwegian governess and subsequently in Hannover from age 11, Paris from age 15, the school of domestic science at Reifenstein Abbey from age 18, and Newnham College, Cambridge from 21. As a teenager, she watched Kaiser Wilhelm II inspect his troops. In the First World War she worked as an interpreter and nurse in Scottish units on the Russian and Macedonian fronts and treated the victims of the German assault.Career
After working in hospitals, she taught at Cambridge and in 1936 became a professor at the University of Manchester. Her works include a trilogy on ritual magic and the occult, especially in the Faust legend.In her 1935 work, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany, she wrote that Germany has had "too much exposure to Ancient Greek literature and art. The result was that the German mind had succumbed to 'the tyranny of an ideal'. The German worship of Ancient Greece had emboldened the Nazis to remake Europe in their image." It was controversial in Britain and its translation was banned in Germany. Butler also wrote two novels. Her autobiography, Paper Boats, was published by William Collins, Sons in the year of her death.
Butler was awarded an honorary doctorate from London University in 1957 and one from Oxford University in 1958.
Legacy
In her research on German orientalism, the scholar Suzanne L. Marchand built upon Butler's German cultural critique; Marchand, too, emphasised the political overtones of Orientalistik and Germany's philhellenism. Marchand is critical of Edward Said's view, expressed in his Orientalism, that German orientalism was not of the same pernicious quality as the orientalism of the colonial powers, France and Britain. Said's belief was that Germany historically had a mostly "classical" interest in the Orient. In contrast, Marchand agrees with Butler in concluding that the use of classical Greece by 18th- to the early-20th-century German nationalism was a factor in the rise of fascist ideology.Personal life
Butler had a long-term committed relationship with fellow-scholar Isaline Blew Horner. From 1926 until Butler's death, the two lived and travelled together.Butler died in London on 13 November 1959.