My husband, Donald Bruce, who has died aged 86, was an academic and author. Books were his life.
The son of James Bruce, a heating and ventilation engineer, and his wife, Annie (nee Williams). He was born and brought up in London. As a schoolboy, while evacuated to south Wales to stay with his grandmother during the second world war, he bought a copy of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene at Swansea market. He would read this by a waterfall near his grandmother’s house in the village of Godrergraig, soaking up its tales of chivalry.
Donald’s wide reading helped him to win a place at Sutton grammar school and then a scholarship to University College London to study English. Eventually he became a lecturer in English literature at Westfield College, University of London (now part of Queen Mary University of London), where he and I met in 1968, when I was a postgraduate student. We married in 1971 and had three children, Toby, Anne and Lizzie.
The children slotted into his routine of visiting secondhand bookshops, going for walks in Richmond Park, swimming on a Saturday. Afterwards it was on to the pub for a drink in the beergarden, an activity known as “going to the nightclub”. Anne’s primary school teacher once inquired if she had really attended a “nightclub” at the weekend.
Donald published several books. The first, Radical Dr Smollett (1965),was described by one reviewer as “most refreshing and richly informative”. Other titles followed: Topics of Restoration Comedy (1974) and a novel, Amaryllis Brown; The Last Pastoral Romance (1991). Sadly, his life’s work on The Faerie Queene and an extensive study of the German painter Lucas Cranach are left unfinished.
Donald retired from Westfield College in 1993 and became art correspondent of the Contemporary Review journal, contributing pieces on exhibitions in London to almost every edition. He continued writing for it until 2013.
Reading, searching for books and adding missing volumes to his collections filled his last years. He also carried on swimming until last October.
He managed to add one final book to his collection on a last visit to the Oxfam bookshop not long before his death.
He is survived by me, our three children and four grandchildren.
