Ruth Padel
Encyclopedia
Ruth Sophia Padel is a British poet, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
and Zoological Society of London
. She also writes non-fiction and more recently fiction, broadcasts on wildlife, poetry and literature for BBC Radio 3 and 4, and is Writer in Residence at The Environment Institute, University College, London.
2nd Baronet
and Nora Barlow
, née Darwin, grand-daughter of Charles Darwin
, through whom Padel is Darwin's great-great-grandchild. Her brother is historian Oliver Padel
; cousins include prison reformer Una Padel
, sculptor Phyllida Barlow
and biographer Randal Keynes
. Padel was born in Wimpole Street
where her great-grandfather Sir Thomas Barlow practised medicine. She attended North London Collegiate School
, studied classics
at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford
where she sang in the Schola Cantorum of Oxford
, wrote a PhD on Greek poetry and was first Bowra Research Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford
, which altered its Statutes for her to accommodate female Fellows; she was thus among the first women to become Fellows of formerly all-male Oxford colleges. She taught Greek at Oxford and Birkbeck, University of London
, taught opera in the Modern Greek Department at Princeton University
, has lived extensively in Greece, and in Paris where she sang in the Choir of Église Saint-Eustache
, Paris. She was married to philosopher Myles Burnyeat
; they have one daughter.
Recommendation), Fusewire and Rembrandt Would Have Loved You (PBS Choice, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize). She won the 1996 UK National Poetry Competition with a long poem, “Icicles Round a Tree in Dumfriesshire,” based on an Andy Goldsworthy
ice sculpture and from 1998 to 2001 pioneered The Sunday Poem, an innovative and influential weekly column in London's Independent on Sunday of close readings of contemporary poems, which she collected and developed in her books 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem and The Poem and the Journey. Chair of the UK Poetry Society 2004-2007, she overhauled its constitution and presided over the establishment of poetry 'Stanzas' across the UK. Her interest in combining poetry, science and religion is reflected in poems on genetics
, debates on poetry and prayer with Rowan Williams
, Archbishop of Canterbury
lectures at the Royal College of Surgeons, her work on Charles Darwin
and a residency at the Environment Institute, University College London. In 2009 her Darwin - A Life in Poems was shortlisted for the Costa Prize; in 2010 she chaired the Judges for the Forward Poetry Prize
and in 2011 delivered the Housman Lecture at the Hay Festival
on "The Name and Nature of Poetry."
, especially Crete
. Reviewers of her work characterize it as lyrical, musical, passionate and subtle, with rich language, vivid humanism, glittering imagery, cool vernacular, a wide range of reference, passion, wit, music, texture and elegance, 'As if Wallace Stevens had hijacked Sylvia Plath with a dash of punk Sappho thrown in." (The Times Literary Supplement
) Technically, she deploys internal rhymes and half-rhymes to song-like effects and the enjambment, or run-over line, displaying 'unusual energy within and against the line. Quoted influences include Gerard Manley Hopkins and choral passages of Greek tragedy where, she has said, "the words curl in images over each other" and "one word can turn the whole feel of a poem over on itself". It is claimed that her poetry 'shows us something important about the work of poetry" and behind it is a ‘big-picture view of what poetry is." Padel's poetry from 1998 to 2004 reflect motifs of other books she wrote in those years: music (as in I’m a Man - Sex, Gods and Rock ‘n’ Roll), technical attention to the poetic line (as in 52 Ways of Looking At A Poem) exemplified in poems such as 'Writing to Onegin', 'Icicles Round a Tree in Dumfrieeshire;' and wildlife and zoology (as in Tigers in Red Weather) as for example,'Tiger Drinking at Forest Pool'. More recent poems such as 'Pieter the Funny One', on Pieter Bruegel’s ‘Triumph of Death’, which won 3rd Prize in the 2006 Arvon Competition, and her poem 'Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth', which she has stated came out of listening to a concert of oud
players from Nazareth
, suggest a new direction.
were received as innovative genre-breaking work, both biography and lyric, welcomed by scientists and the literary community. They covered Darwin's life, family and science. Reviewed as a 'new species of biography' in verse, the book offered 'drama, speed, rich imagery and an inner voice with tragic overtones'. Its emotional centre was the Darwins' marriage, shaken by divergent religious belief; and by the death of a daughter. Since Padel is a Darwin descendent, the work was also a family memoir. Her Preface illuminates the role of Padel’s grandmother Nora Barlow
, who in editing Darwin's Autobiography restored a passage in which Darwin said he did not see how anyone could wish the doctrine of hell to be true; this had been deleted by the first editor, Darwin's son Francis
at his mother's request. Padel's poems connected Darwin's loss of his mother as a child with his passion for collecting; and linked his early scientific writing with his taxidermy teacher in Edinburgh John Edmonstone
, a freed slave from Guiana
.
. These works were followed by Silent Letters of the Alphabet. Her criticism uses acute close analysis and lightly worn knowledge of Greek poetics, myth, metaphor, tone and rhyme.
She is said to read with remarkable aural acuity and generosity, is never polemical, and her precision does not obscure but builds the big picture. She addresses the general reader but with 'utmost attention to the page.' She has also written Introductions to the works of Palestinian poets Mahmoud Darwish
, Mourid Barghouti
and Ramsey Nasr, as well as of Walter Ralegh, Tennyson and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
At the opening festival of the T S Eliot Festival at Little Gidding
in 2006, 70 years after Eliot's visit there, Padel described the contrast between Eliot's memories of Little Gidding and his experience of The Blitz
whilst writing the poem. "It reminded him there was still a place that had a sense of truth." She returned to this moment in her Forward to the posthumous volume of Mahmoud Darwish, comparing his writing to that of Seamus Heaney
in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and of Eliot during the London blitz.
on ancient Greece,
As scholar of Greek tragedy
, Padel concentrated on tragedy's ideas of mind, and defined the tragic hero as the embodiment of the human mind, 'which lives catastrophe, suffers damage and endures.' She began In and Out of the Mind with Hermes, god of interpretation; she ended Whom Gods Destroy with a discussion of Munch's The Scream
whose face resembles a tragic mask. In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self, written both for the professional Hellenist and general readers, explores the way Greek ideas of inwardness shaped European notions of the self. Arguing that tragedy, like its own vision of the self
, is where the terrible may also be illuminating, she used anthropology
and psychoanalysis
to support her thesis that male Greek culture spoke of the mind as mainly female: receptive rather than active. Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Madness in Greek and Other Tragedy investigates madness in tragedy from the Greeks to Shakespeare and the moderns, parsing different views of madness in different societies. In her more popular work I'm A Man: Sex, Gods and Rock 'n' Roll(2000) she argues that rock music
began as a ‘wishing well of masculinity,' which drew on mythic connections between male sexuality, aggression, anxiety, misogyny and violence which derived from Ancient Greece
. She has stated that she intended it to focus on women's song, but found that an essential prequisite to exploring women's voices was analyzing the maleness of rock music and the ways it represents women. The book had a mixed reception from male reviewers. Women reviewers described it as original, beautifully expressed, vivid, amusing and convincing; Rock writers Charles Shaar Murray
and Casper Llewellyn Smith found it 'provocative and fascinating' and her analysis of rock
's misogyny
'dazzling.'
conservation
, drawing on her scientific background and Darwinian descent, was valued internationally for its insights on conservation, as travel writing with introductions to little-known parts of the world such as Sumatra
, Bhutan
and Ussuriland, its ear for dialogue and the quality of nature writing
. But center-stage was the tiger and the frontline field-zoologist, ‘living uncomfortably alone in remote places between despair and day-to-day hope.’ Padel continues to write on tigers and more widely on wildlife.
and UK, reviewers commented on the story-telling, the lyrical prose, moving family story, acute perspective on wildlife conservation and imaginative connections between nature, poetry and science. "She has done for the forests of Karnataka and Bengal what Amitav Ghosh did for the Sundarbans in The Hungry Tide."
director for London Review of Books
, she has written on opera and a sixteenth-century madrigal
, in a Radio 3 series ‘Writers as Musicians’ she spoke about playing viola
,
an instrument whose ‘inner voice’ illustrates her Newcastle Poetry Lectures Silent Letters of the Alphabet, and has broadcast opera interval talks for BBC Radio 3
. For BBC Radio 4
she has written and presented features on writers, scientists and composers including Hans Christian Andersen
, Edward Elgar
, Charles Darwin
and W.S. Gilbert. As guest on Desert Island Discs
. she chose Verdi's Requiem, ‘Down by the Salley Gardens
’ sung by Kathleen Ferrier
, ‘I’m Ready for You’ sung by Muddy Waters
, a Cretan folksong and 'The Boys from Piraeus,’ from the film Never on Sunday
. Her luxury was a herd of deer.
in 2002 and opened the 2009 Edinburgh International Book Festival
with a reading of 'Darwin - A Life in Poems.' The following year at the same festival she curated and presented a series of literary events around “Writing the Family”. She has been Writer in Residence at Christ's College, Cambridge
and as first Writer in Residence at Somerset House
she inaugurated the Writers' Talks at the Courtauld Institute of Art
. In March 2009 she read and discussed Darwin at the University of Havana
, at the Poetry Society of America
in Lillian Vernon House, New York and at the New York Botanical Garden
. Since 2005 she has taught and lectured on conservation, nature writing and the environment and was Resident Poet in the Environment Institute, University College London, 2010–2011. She has read and lectured on nature in Mumbai, at the Bombay Natural History Society
and Prithvi Theatre
.
at Oxford, the first woman since the Chair was founded in 1708. She received 297 votes, a higher percentage of the electorate (composed of Oxford University Members and alumni) than James Fenton
, who received 228 in 1994 and Christopher Ricks
who received 214 votes in 2004. (The system now allows online voting, which enables many more to vote.) She resigned before taking office due to a media storm amid press allegations that she had "smeared" her main rival, Nobel-Prize-winner Derek Walcott
who withdrew before the election. Walcott's candidacy had been controversial in the University from the start. Some counselled against, on grounds of Walcott’s university record of sexual harassment in the US; others dimissed this record as irrelevant since the post does not require student contact. Newspapers claimed Walcott was the favourite, but The Times
pointed out this was a lazy understanding of a system which does not admit of favourites: the number of supporters listed in the University Gazette gives no clue to the final outcome.
American commentators attributed the storm to a gender
war, some British commentators to misogyny
, and London's The Observer
newspaper to ‘toxicity of the metropolitan media
’: the story "had everything, from sex claims to allegations of character assassination"; it allowed the press "simultaneously to pursue allegations in Walcott's past and criticize Padel for having mentioned these allegations as a source of voters' disquiet". Allegations against Padel began before the election when The Sunday Times
reported that photocopied pages of a University of Illinois publication, detailing cases of sexual harassment laid against Walcott at Boston University
and Harvard University
, had been sent anonymously to Oxford academics. Walcott announced his withdrawal not through Oxford University but through London's newspaper The Evening Standard, which led a series of allegations against Padel picked up by other papers. Padel criticized the anonymous missives, said 'I wish he had not pulled out' and denied connection with them. There was no evidence to link her to them, but the press widely alleged her involvement. After her election, The Evening Standard published an email in which, responding to requests for information on pre-election opinion at Oxford, Padel had mentioned voters' unease at Walcott's university record. Evidence for this unease was in the public domain and there was no evidence that anything Padel had written led to any published article or to Walcott's withdrawal, but Padel resigned, saying she had been naive to mention disquiet about Walcott's teaching record, and apologizing for doing anything which could be misconstrued as against Walcott. Asked if she would encourage Walcott to stand again, Padel replied, "Yes, if he wants. I think he'd do good lectures." Letters to British newspapers criticized media handling of the affair. Letters to The Guardian
complained of unfair denigration of Padel, "justly held in high regard for her poetry and teaching." A letter to The Times Literary Supplement
complained of unfair media pursuit of Walcott's past; a letter to The Times claimed that Oxford had "missed out for the worst of reasons on an inspirational teacher: Walcott removed the decision from the electorate by his own choice; Padel should not have been made to pay for his decision to confront neither his accusers nor his past." On Newsnight Review, the poet Simon Armitage
and poetry promoter Josephine Hart
expressed regret about her resignation. "Ruth's a good person," Simon Armitage said. "I don't think she should have resigned, she would have been good." Padel subsequently supported Geoffrey Hill
in the following election in which Hill was appointed.
Royal Society of Literature
The Royal Society of Literature is the "senior literary organisation in Britain". It was founded in 1820 by George IV, in order to "reward literary merit and excite literary talent". The Society's first president was Thomas Burgess, who later became the Bishop of Salisbury...
and Zoological Society of London
Zoological Society of London
The Zoological Society of London is a charity devoted to the worldwide conservation of animals and their habitats...
. She also writes non-fiction and more recently fiction, broadcasts on wildlife, poetry and literature for BBC Radio 3 and 4, and is Writer in Residence at The Environment Institute, University College, London.
Biography
Padel is daughter of psychoanalyst John Hunter Padel and Hilda, daughter of Sir (James) Alan Noel BarlowAlan Barlow
Sir James Alan Noel Barlow, 2nd Baronet GCB KBE FSA was a British civil servant and collector of Islamic and Chinese art.- Biography :...
2nd Baronet
Barlow Baronets
There have been four Baronetcies created for persons with the surname Barlow, one in the Baronetage of England and three in the Baronetage of the United Kingdom....
and Nora Barlow
Nora Barlow
Emma Nora Barlow was the granddaughter of the British naturalist Charles Darwin, who edited and published previously unseen examples of her grandfather's work.- Biography :...
, née Darwin, grand-daughter of Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
, through whom Padel is Darwin's great-great-grandchild. Her brother is historian Oliver Padel
Oliver Padel
Oliver James Padel is an authority on the origin and meaning of place-names, currently Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic in the University of Cambridge and Visiting Professor of Celtic at the University of the West of England.He was born in 1948...
; cousins include prison reformer Una Padel
Una Padel
Una Padel was a British criminal-justice reformer, known for her work in penal reform. She was the director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies from 1999 until her death in 2006, after which the centre established the Una Padel Award.- Life and career :Born in Hampstead, London, Padel...
, sculptor Phyllida Barlow
Phyllida Barlow
Gillian Phyllida Barlow is a British sculptor and art academic. She was Professor of Fine Art and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Slade School of Art.- Personal background :...
and biographer Randal Keynes
Randal Keynes
Randal Hume Keynes, OBE, FLS is a British conservationist, author and great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin. He is the author of the intimate exploration of his famous ancestry, Annie's Box, subtitled Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution , a book about the relationship between Darwin and his...
. Padel was born in Wimpole Street
Wimpole Street
Wimpole Street is a street in central London, England. Located in the City of Westminster, it is associated with private medical practice and medical associations. No. 1 Wimpole Street is an example of Edwardian baroque architecture, completed in 1912 by architect John Belcher as the home of the...
where her great-grandfather Sir Thomas Barlow practised medicine. She attended North London Collegiate School
North London Collegiate School
North London Collegiate School is an independent day school for girls founded in 1850 in Camden Town, and now in the London Borough of Harrow.The Good Schools Guide called the school an "Academically stunning outer London school in a glorious setting which, in 2003, demonstrated its refusal to rest...
, studied classics
Literae Humaniores
Literae Humaniores is the name given to an undergraduate course focused on Classics at Oxford and some other universities.The Latin name means literally "more humane letters", but is perhaps better rendered as "Advanced Studies", since humaniores has the sense of "more refined" or "more learned",...
at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford
Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford
Lady Margaret Hall is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England, located at the end of Norham Gardens in north Oxford. As of 2006 the college had an estimated financial endowment of £34m....
where she sang in the Schola Cantorum of Oxford
Schola Cantorum of Oxford
Schola Cantorum of Oxford is the longest running chamber choir of Oxford University, and one of the longest established and widely known chamber choirs in the UK. It was founded in 1960 by the British-Hungarian conductor Laszlo Heltay as 'The Collegium Musicum Oxoniense' before adopting the name...
, wrote a PhD on Greek poetry and was first Bowra Research Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford
Wadham College, Oxford
Wadham College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, located at the southern end of Parks Road in central Oxford. It was founded by Nicholas and Dorothy Wadham, wealthy Somerset landowners, during the reign of King James I...
, which altered its Statutes for her to accommodate female Fellows; she was thus among the first women to become Fellows of formerly all-male Oxford colleges. She taught Greek at Oxford and Birkbeck, University of London
Birkbeck, University of London
Birkbeck, University of London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and a constituent college of the federal University of London. It offers many Master's and Bachelor's degree programmes that can be studied either part-time or full-time, though nearly all teaching is...
, taught opera in the Modern Greek Department at Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
, has lived extensively in Greece, and in Paris where she sang in the Choir of Église Saint-Eustache
Église Saint-Eustache, Paris
L’église Saint-Eustache is a church in the 1st arrondissement of Paris, built between 1532 and 1632.Situated at the entrance to Paris’s ancient markets and the beginning of rue Montorgueil, the Église de Saint-Eustache is considered a masterpiece of late Gothic architecture...
, Paris. She was married to philosopher Myles Burnyeat
Myles Burnyeat
Myles Fredric Burnyeat CBE FBA is an English classicist and philosopher.-Life:Educated at Bryanston School and King’s College, Cambridge, Burnyeat was a student of Bernard Williams at University College London....
; they have one daughter.
Work
Described as one of 'Britain’s leading female thinkers, Padel writes poetry, criticism, non-fiction and fiction.Poetry
Padel published her first poetry pamphlet in 1985 while teaching Greek at Birkbeck College, London and left academia to support herself by reviewing. Through the 1990s she published four collections, Summer Snow, Angel (Poetry Book SocietyPoetry Book Society
The Poetry Book Society was founded by T. S. Eliot and friends in 1953. Each quarter the Society selects one recently published collection of poetry for its members. The Society also publishes the quarterly poetry journal Bulletin, and it administers the competition for the annual T. S. Eliot Prize...
Recommendation), Fusewire and Rembrandt Would Have Loved You (PBS Choice, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize). She won the 1996 UK National Poetry Competition with a long poem, “Icicles Round a Tree in Dumfriesshire,” based on an Andy Goldsworthy
Andy Goldsworthy
Andy Goldsworthy, OBE is a British sculptor, photographer and environmentalist producing site-specific sculpture and land art situated in natural and urban settings. He lives and works in Scotland.-Life and career:The son of F...
ice sculpture and from 1998 to 2001 pioneered The Sunday Poem, an innovative and influential weekly column in London's Independent on Sunday of close readings of contemporary poems, which she collected and developed in her books 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem and The Poem and the Journey. Chair of the UK Poetry Society 2004-2007, she overhauled its constitution and presided over the establishment of poetry 'Stanzas' across the UK. Her interest in combining poetry, science and religion is reflected in poems on genetics
Genetics
Genetics , a discipline of biology, is the science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms....
, debates on poetry and prayer with Rowan Williams
Rowan Williams
Rowan Douglas Williams FRSL, FBA, FLSW is an Anglican bishop, poet and theologian. He is the 104th and current Archbishop of Canterbury, Metropolitan of the Province of Canterbury and Primate of All England, offices he has held since early 2003.Williams was previously Bishop of Monmouth and...
, Archbishop of Canterbury
Archbishop of Canterbury
The Archbishop of Canterbury is the senior bishop and principal leader of the Church of England, the symbolic head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, and the diocesan bishop of the Diocese of Canterbury. In his role as head of the Anglican Communion, the archbishop leads the third largest group...
lectures at the Royal College of Surgeons, her work on Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
and a residency at the Environment Institute, University College London. In 2009 her Darwin - A Life in Poems was shortlisted for the Costa Prize; in 2010 she chaired the Judges for the Forward Poetry Prize
Forward Poetry Prize
The Forward Poetry Prizes were created in 1991. The aim of the prizes is to extend the audience for contemporary poetry. Until the T.S. Eliot Prize remuneration was increased to £15,000 plus £1000 to each of nine runners-up, the Forward was the United Kingdom's most valuable annual poetry...
and in 2011 delivered the Housman Lecture at the Hay Festival
Hay Festival
The Hay Festival of Literature & Arts is an annual literature festival held in Hay-on-Wye, Powys, Wales for ten days from May to June. Devised by Norman and Peter Florence in 1988, the festival was described by Bill Clinton in 2001 as "The Woodstock of the mind"...
on "The Name and Nature of Poetry."
Style and Themes
Noted as an inspiring performer of her work, Padel addresses themes such as painting, music, science, history, wildlife, love and human relations. Her stylistic hallmarks are said to be rich imagery and lyricism, erudition and acute intelligence. Her first collection Summer Snow, 1990, drew on her knowledge of ancient GreeceGreece
Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....
, especially Crete
Crete
Crete is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, the fifth largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, and one of the thirteen administrative regions of Greece. It forms a significant part of the economy and cultural heritage of Greece while retaining its own local cultural traits...
. Reviewers of her work characterize it as lyrical, musical, passionate and subtle, with rich language, vivid humanism, glittering imagery, cool vernacular, a wide range of reference, passion, wit, music, texture and elegance, 'As if Wallace Stevens had hijacked Sylvia Plath with a dash of punk Sappho thrown in." (The Times Literary Supplement
The Times Literary Supplement
The Times Literary Supplement is a weekly literary review published in London by News International, a subsidiary of News Corporation.-History:...
) Technically, she deploys internal rhymes and half-rhymes to song-like effects and the enjambment, or run-over line, displaying 'unusual energy within and against the line. Quoted influences include Gerard Manley Hopkins and choral passages of Greek tragedy where, she has said, "the words curl in images over each other" and "one word can turn the whole feel of a poem over on itself". It is claimed that her poetry 'shows us something important about the work of poetry" and behind it is a ‘big-picture view of what poetry is." Padel's poetry from 1998 to 2004 reflect motifs of other books she wrote in those years: music (as in I’m a Man - Sex, Gods and Rock ‘n’ Roll), technical attention to the poetic line (as in 52 Ways of Looking At A Poem) exemplified in poems such as 'Writing to Onegin', 'Icicles Round a Tree in Dumfrieeshire;' and wildlife and zoology (as in Tigers in Red Weather) as for example,'Tiger Drinking at Forest Pool'. More recent poems such as 'Pieter the Funny One', on Pieter Bruegel’s ‘Triumph of Death’, which won 3rd Prize in the 2006 Arvon Competition, and her poem 'Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth', which she has stated came out of listening to a concert of oud
Oud
The oud is a pear-shaped stringed instrument commonly used in North African and Middle Eastern music. The modern oud and the European lute both descend from a common ancestor via diverging paths...
players from Nazareth
Nazareth
Nazareth is the largest city in the North District of Israel. Known as "the Arab capital of Israel," the population is made up predominantly of Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel...
, suggest a new direction.
Poems on Darwin
Padel's 2009 poems on Charles DarwinCharles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
were received as innovative genre-breaking work, both biography and lyric, welcomed by scientists and the literary community. They covered Darwin's life, family and science. Reviewed as a 'new species of biography' in verse, the book offered 'drama, speed, rich imagery and an inner voice with tragic overtones'. Its emotional centre was the Darwins' marriage, shaken by divergent religious belief; and by the death of a daughter. Since Padel is a Darwin descendent, the work was also a family memoir. Her Preface illuminates the role of Padel’s grandmother Nora Barlow
Nora Barlow
Emma Nora Barlow was the granddaughter of the British naturalist Charles Darwin, who edited and published previously unseen examples of her grandfather's work.- Biography :...
, who in editing Darwin's Autobiography restored a passage in which Darwin said he did not see how anyone could wish the doctrine of hell to be true; this had been deleted by the first editor, Darwin's son Francis
Francis Darwin
Sir Francis "Frank" Darwin, FRS , a son of the British naturalist and scientist Charles Darwin, followed his father into botany.-Biography:Francis Darwin was born in Down House, Downe, Kent in 1848...
at his mother's request. Padel's poems connected Darwin's loss of his mother as a child with his passion for collecting; and linked his early scientific writing with his taxidermy teacher in Edinburgh John Edmonstone
John Edmonstone
John Edmonstone was originally a black slave probably born in Demarara . He learned taxidermy from Charles Waterton, whose father in law, Charles Edmonstone had a plantation in Demarara.After he was freed, John came to Glasgow with his former master, Charles Edmonstone...
, a freed slave from Guiana
Guyana
Guyana , officially the Co-operative Republic of Guyana, previously the colony of British Guiana, is a sovereign state on the northern coast of South America that is culturally part of the Anglophone Caribbean. Guyana was a former colony of the Dutch and of the British...
.
Criticism: Reading Poetry
Padel's books on reading contemporary poetry, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem (2002), and The Poem and the Journey (2005), the popular newspaper column she wrote out of which they grew, have influenced a decade of writing and thinking about poetry in the UK. "Ruth Padel combines two major gifts: she is a distinguished poet with a delightful skill in explanation and the instinct of a caring, clearsighted guide to how poetry works and why it matters," said critic George SteinerGeorge Steiner
Francis George Steiner, FBA , is an influential European-born American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist, translator, and educator. He has written extensively about the relationship between language, literature and society, and the impact of the Holocaust...
. These works were followed by Silent Letters of the Alphabet. Her criticism uses acute close analysis and lightly worn knowledge of Greek poetics, myth, metaphor, tone and rhyme.
She is said to read with remarkable aural acuity and generosity, is never polemical, and her precision does not obscure but builds the big picture. She addresses the general reader but with 'utmost attention to the page.' She has also written Introductions to the works of Palestinian poets Mahmoud Darwish
Mahmoud Darwish
Mahmoud Darwish was a Palestinian poet and author who won numerous awards for his literary output and was regarded as the Palestinian national poet...
, Mourid Barghouti
Mourid Barghouti
Mourid Barghouti or Mureed Barghouti or Murid Barguti or Murid Barghuti is a Palestinian poet and writer....
and Ramsey Nasr, as well as of Walter Ralegh, Tennyson and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
At the opening festival of the T S Eliot Festival at Little Gidding
Little Gidding, Cambridgeshire
Little Gidding is a parish and small village in Huntingdonshire , England, near Sawtry and north west of Huntingdon.-History:The parish of Little Gidding is small, consisting of only 724 acres...
in 2006, 70 years after Eliot's visit there, Padel described the contrast between Eliot's memories of Little Gidding and his experience of The Blitz
The Blitz
The Blitz was the sustained strategic bombing of Britain by Nazi Germany between 7 September 1940 and 10 May 1941, during the Second World War. The city of London was bombed by the Luftwaffe for 76 consecutive nights and many towns and cities across the country followed...
whilst writing the poem. "It reminded him there was still a place that had a sense of truth." She returned to this moment in her Forward to the posthumous volume of Mahmoud Darwish, comparing his writing to that of Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer. He lives in Dublin. Heaney has received the Nobel Prize in Literature , the Golden Wreath of Poetry , T. S. Eliot Prize and two Whitbread prizes...
in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and of Eliot during the London blitz.
'Poetry Workshop' Radio 4
Noted as an inspiring teacher, Padel presents 'Poetry Workshop': a quarterly series of programmes on writing poetry for BBC Radio 4, in which she visits different poetry groups across the UK to discuss their new work with them.Scholarship & Myth
While publishing poetry, Padel has written a series of non-fiction works, beginning with two books for Princeton University PressPrinceton University Press
-Further reading:* "". Artforum International, 2005.-External links:* * * * *...
on ancient Greece,
As scholar of Greek tragedy
Tragedy
Tragedy is a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure. While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of...
, Padel concentrated on tragedy's ideas of mind, and defined the tragic hero as the embodiment of the human mind, 'which lives catastrophe, suffers damage and endures.' She began In and Out of the Mind with Hermes, god of interpretation; she ended Whom Gods Destroy with a discussion of Munch's The Scream
The Scream
Scream is the title of Expressionist paintings and prints in a series by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, showing an agonized figure against a blood red sky...
whose face resembles a tragic mask. In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self, written both for the professional Hellenist and general readers, explores the way Greek ideas of inwardness shaped European notions of the self. Arguing that tragedy, like its own vision of the self
Self
The self is an individual person as the object of his or her own reflective consciousness. The self has been studied extensively by philosophers and psychologists and is central to many world religions.-Philosophy:...
, is where the terrible may also be illuminating, she used anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
and psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
to support her thesis that male Greek culture spoke of the mind as mainly female: receptive rather than active. Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Madness in Greek and Other Tragedy investigates madness in tragedy from the Greeks to Shakespeare and the moderns, parsing different views of madness in different societies. In her more popular work I'm A Man: Sex, Gods and Rock 'n' Roll(2000) she argues that rock music
Rock music
Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during and after the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music...
began as a ‘wishing well of masculinity,' which drew on mythic connections between male sexuality, aggression, anxiety, misogyny and violence which derived from Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
. She has stated that she intended it to focus on women's song, but found that an essential prequisite to exploring women's voices was analyzing the maleness of rock music and the ways it represents women. The book had a mixed reception from male reviewers. Women reviewers described it as original, beautifully expressed, vivid, amusing and convincing; Rock writers Charles Shaar Murray
Charles Shaar Murray
Charles Shaar Murray is an English music journalist. His first experience in journalism came 1970 when he was asked to contribute to the satirical magazine Oz...
and Casper Llewellyn Smith found it 'provocative and fascinating' and her analysis of rock
Rock music
Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during and after the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music...
's misogyny
Misogyny
Misogyny is the hatred or dislike of women or girls. Philogyny, meaning fondness, love or admiration towards women, is the antonym of misogyny. The term misandry is the term for men that is parallel to misogyny...
'dazzling.'
Nature Writing
Padel's account of frontline tigerTiger
The tiger is the largest cat species, reaching a total body length of up to and weighing up to . Their most recognizable feature is a pattern of dark vertical stripes on reddish-orange fur with lighter underparts...
conservation
Conservation movement
The conservation movement, also known as nature conservation, is a political, environmental and a social movement that seeks to protect natural resources including animal, fungus and plant species as well as their habitat for the future....
, drawing on her scientific background and Darwinian descent, was valued internationally for its insights on conservation, as travel writing with introductions to little-known parts of the world such as Sumatra
Sumatra
Sumatra is an island in western Indonesia, westernmost of the Sunda Islands. It is the largest island entirely in Indonesia , and the sixth largest island in the world at 473,481 km2 with a population of 50,365,538...
, Bhutan
Bhutan
Bhutan , officially the Kingdom of Bhutan, is a landlocked state in South Asia, located at the eastern end of the Himalayas and bordered to the south, east and west by the Republic of India and to the north by the People's Republic of China...
and Ussuriland, its ear for dialogue and the quality of nature writing
Nature writing
Nature writing is generally defined as nonfiction prose writing about the natural environment. Nature writing often draws heavily on scientific information and facts about the natural world; at the same time, it is frequently written in the first person and incorporates personal observations of and...
. But center-stage was the tiger and the frontline field-zoologist, ‘living uncomfortably alone in remote places between despair and day-to-day hope.’ Padel continues to write on tigers and more widely on wildlife.
Fiction
Padel's first novel continued her conservation and zoology interests. Where the Serpent Lives, set in tropical forest, Devon woods and London during 2007, was noted for vivid nature writing, innovative use of science, and the animal's viewpoint in its description of wildlife. In IndiaIndia
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
and UK, reviewers commented on the story-telling, the lyrical prose, moving family story, acute perspective on wildlife conservation and imaginative connections between nature, poetry and science. "She has done for the forests of Karnataka and Bengal what Amitav Ghosh did for the Sundarbans in The Hungry Tide."
Radio and Music
Padel's radio work reflects her interest in music, literature, nature and the environment. In Wild Things, a series of radio essays for Radio 3, she explored the myths and ecology of five British wild creatures. She has said that if she could choose any other career it would be operaOpera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
director for London Review of Books
London Review of Books
The London Review of Books is a fortnightly British magazine of literary and intellectual essays.-History:The LRB was founded in 1979, during the year-long lock-out at The Times, by publisher A...
, she has written on opera and a sixteenth-century madrigal
Madrigal (music)
A madrigal is a secular vocal music composition, usually a partsong, of the Renaissance and early Baroque eras. Traditionally, polyphonic madrigals are unaccompanied; the number of voices varies from two to eight, and most frequently from three to six....
, in a Radio 3 series ‘Writers as Musicians’ she spoke about playing viola
Viola
The viola is a bowed string instrument. It is the middle voice of the violin family, between the violin and the cello.- Form :The viola is similar in material and construction to the violin. A full-size viola's body is between and longer than the body of a full-size violin , with an average...
,
an instrument whose ‘inner voice’ illustrates her Newcastle Poetry Lectures Silent Letters of the Alphabet, and has broadcast opera interval talks for BBC Radio 3
BBC Radio 3
BBC Radio 3 is a national radio station operated by the BBC within the United Kingdom. Its output centres on classical music and opera, but jazz, world music, drama, culture and the arts also feature. The station is the world’s most significant commissioner of new music, and its New Generation...
. For BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4 is a British domestic radio station, operated and owned by the BBC, that broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history. It replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. The station controller is currently Gwyneth Williams, and the...
she has written and presented features on writers, scientists and composers including Hans Christian Andersen
Hans Christian Andersen
Hans Christian Andersen was a Danish author, fairy tale writer, and poet noted for his children's stories. These include "The Steadfast Tin Soldier," "The Snow Queen," "The Little Mermaid," "Thumbelina," "The Little Match Girl," and "The Ugly Duckling."...
, Edward Elgar
Edward Elgar
Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet OM, GCVO was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, concertos...
, Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
and W.S. Gilbert. As guest on Desert Island Discs
Desert Island Discs
Desert Island Discs is a BBC Radio 4 programme first broadcast on 29 January 1942. It is the second longest-running radio programme , and is the longest-running factual programme in the history of radio...
. she chose Verdi's Requiem, ‘Down by the Salley Gardens
Down By The Salley Gardens
Down by the Salley Gardens is a poem by William Butler Yeats published in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems in 1889...
’ sung by Kathleen Ferrier
Kathleen Ferrier
Kathleen Mary Ferrier CBE was an English contralto who achieved an international reputation as a stage, concert and recording artist, with a repertoire extending from folksong and popular ballads to the classical works of Bach, Brahms, Mahler and Elgar...
, ‘I’m Ready for You’ sung by Muddy Waters
Muddy Waters
McKinley Morganfield , known as Muddy Waters, was an American blues musician, generally considered the "father of modern Chicago blues"...
, a Cretan folksong and 'The Boys from Piraeus,’ from the film Never on Sunday
Never on Sunday
Never on Sunday is a 1960 Greek black-and-white film which tells the story of Ilya, a prostitute who lives in the port of Piraeus in Greece, and Homer, an American tourist from Middletown, Connecticut — a classical scholar enamored with all things Greek. Ilya is a character close to the...
. Her luxury was a herd of deer.
Poetry
- Alibi 1985
- Summer Snow 1990
- Angel 1993
- Fusewire 1996
- Rembrandt Would Have Loved You 1998
- Voodoo Shop 2002
- Soho Leopard 2004
- Darwin - a Life in Poems 2009
Criticism, Editing
- 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem: How Reading Modern Poetry Can Change Your Life 2002
- The Poem and the Journey 2006
- Silent Letters of the Alphabet 2010
- Walter Ralegh, Selected Poems 2010
- Alfred Lord Tennyson (Folio Society, Introduction and Notes) 2007
- Gerard Manley Hopkins (Folio Society, Introduction) 2011
Non-fiction
- In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self 1992
- Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness 1995
- I'm a Man: Sex, Gods and Rock 'n' Roll 2000
- Tigers in Red Weather 2005
Awards, Residencies, Appointments
Padel was Poet in Residence for the Henry Wood Promenade ConcertsThe Proms
The Proms, more formally known as The BBC Proms, or The Henry Wood Promenade Concerts presented by the BBC, is an eight-week summer season of daily orchestral classical music concerts and other events held annually, predominantly in the Royal Albert Hall in London...
in 2002 and opened the 2009 Edinburgh International Book Festival
Edinburgh International Book Festival
The Edinburgh International Book Festival, is a book festival that takes place in the last three weeks of August every year in Charlotte Square, in the centre of Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital...
with a reading of 'Darwin - A Life in Poems.' The following year at the same festival she curated and presented a series of literary events around “Writing the Family”. She has been Writer in Residence at Christ's College, Cambridge
Christ's College, Cambridge
Christ's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge.With a reputation for high academic standards, Christ's College averaged top place in the Tompkins Table from 1980-2000 . In 2011, Christ's was placed sixth.-College history:...
and as first Writer in Residence at Somerset House
Somerset House
Somerset House is a large building situated on the south side of the Strand in central London, England, overlooking the River Thames, just east of Waterloo Bridge. The central block of the Neoclassical building, the outstanding project of the architect Sir William Chambers, dates from 1776–96. It...
she inaugurated the Writers' Talks at the Courtauld Institute of Art
Courtauld Institute of Art
The Courtauld Institute of Art is a self-governing college of the University of London specialising in the study of the history of art. The Courtauld is one of the premier centres for the teaching of art history in the world; it was the only History of Art department in the UK to be awarded a top...
. In March 2009 she read and discussed Darwin at the University of Havana
University of Havana
The University of Havana or UH is a university located in the Vedado district of Havana, Cuba. Founded in 1728, the University of Havana is the oldest university in Cuba, and one of the first to be founded in the Americas...
, at the Poetry Society of America
Poetry Society of America
The Poetry Society of America is a literary organization founded in 1910 by poets, editors, and artists including Witter Bynner. It is the oldest poetry organization in the United States. Past members of the have included such renowned writers as Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent...
in Lillian Vernon House, New York and at the New York Botanical Garden
New York Botanical Garden
- See also :* Education in New York City* List of botanical gardens in the United States* List of museums and cultural institutions in New York City- External links :* official website** blog*...
. Since 2005 she has taught and lectured on conservation, nature writing and the environment and was Resident Poet in the Environment Institute, University College London, 2010–2011. She has read and lectured on nature in Mumbai, at the Bombay Natural History Society
Bombay Natural History Society
The Bombay Natural History Society, founded on 15 September 1883, is one of the largest non-governmental organizations in India engaged in conservation and biodiversity research. It supports many research efforts through grants, and publishes the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society. Many...
and Prithvi Theatre
Prithvi Theatre
Prithvi Theatre is one of Mumbai's best known theatres. It belongs to the Kapoor family, one of the most influential actor/director families in Bollywood. The theatre is named after Prithviraj Kapoor who first founded 'Prithvi Theatres', a travelling theatre company in 1944. The company ran for...
.
- 1992 Wingate Scholarship http://www.wingatescholarships.org.uk/
- 1994 Arts Council Writers’ Award for poetry collection Fusewire
- 1996 First Prize, UK National Poetry Competition
- 1996 First Prize, UK National Poetry Competition
- 1998 Rembrandt Would Have Loved You Poetry Book SocietyPoetry Book SocietyThe Poetry Book Society was founded by T. S. Eliot and friends in 1953. Each quarter the Society selects one recently published collection of poetry for its members. The Society also publishes the quarterly poetry journal Bulletin, and it administers the competition for the annual T. S. Eliot Prize...
Choice, shortlisted for T S Eliot Prize - 1998 Appointed Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature
- 2000 Cholmondeley AwardCholmondeley AwardThe Cholmondeley Award is an annual award for poetry given by the Society of Authors in the United Kingdom. Awards honour distinguished poets, from a fund endowed by the late Dowager Marchioness of Cholmondeley in 1966...
from Society of AuthorsSociety of AuthorsThe Society of Authors is a trade union for professional writers that was founded in 1884 to protect the rights of writers and fight to retain those rights .It has counted amongst its members and presidents numerous notable writers and poets including Tennyson The Society of Authors (UK) is a... - 2002 Poetry Residency at Henry Wood Promenade Concerts
- 2002 Voodoo Shop Poetry Book SocietyPoetry Book SocietyThe Poetry Book Society was founded by T. S. Eliot and friends in 1953. Each quarter the Society selects one recently published collection of poetry for its members. The Society also publishes the quarterly poetry journal Bulletin, and it administers the competition for the annual T. S. Eliot Prize...
Recommendation, short-listed for T. S. EliotT. S. EliotThomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
Prize and Whitbread Poetry AwardCosta Book AwardsThe Costa Book Awards are a series of literary awards given to books by authors based in Great Britain and Ireland. They were known as the Whitbread Book Awards until 2005, after which Costa Coffee, a subsidiary of Whitbread, took over sponsorship.... - 2003 Research Award from Calouste Gulbenkian FoundationCalouste Gulbenkian FoundationThe Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation is a Portuguese private foundation of public utility whose statutory aims are in the fields of arts, charity, education, and science...
- 2004 The Soho Leopard Poetry Book SocietyPoetry Book SocietyThe Poetry Book Society was founded by T. S. Eliot and friends in 1953. Each quarter the Society selects one recently published collection of poetry for its members. The Society also publishes the quarterly poetry journal Bulletin, and it administers the competition for the annual T. S. Eliot Prize...
Choice, short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize - 2005 Tigers in Red Weather shortlisted in USA for Kiriyama PrizeKiriyama PrizeThe Kiriyama Prize is an international literary award given to books which will encourage greater understanding of and among the peoples and nations of the Pacific Rim and South Asia...
and in UK for Dolman Best Travel Book AwardDolman Best Travel Book AwardThe Dolman Best Travel Book Award is one of the two principal annual travel book awards in Britain, and the only one that is open to all writers...
. - 2006 Arts Council of England Individual Writer’s Bursary
- 2008 First Writer in Residence at Somerset HouseSomerset HouseSomerset House is a large building situated on the south side of the Strand in central London, England, overlooking the River Thames, just east of Waterloo Bridge. The central block of the Neoclassical building, the outstanding project of the architect Sir William Chambers, dates from 1776–96. It...
, London - 2009 Leverhulme Artist in Residence Award at Christ's College, CambridgeChrist's College, CambridgeChrist's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge.With a reputation for high academic standards, Christ's College averaged top place in the Tompkins Table from 1980-2000 . In 2011, Christ's was placed sixth.-College history:...
- 2009 Elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University
- 2009 British Council Darwin Now Award
- 2009 Darwin - A Life in Poems shortlisted for Costa Book AwardsCosta Book AwardsThe Costa Book Awards are a series of literary awards given to books by authors based in Great Britain and Ireland. They were known as the Whitbread Book Awards until 2005, after which Costa Coffee, a subsidiary of Whitbread, took over sponsorship....
for poetry - 2010-2011 Writer in Residence at the Environment Institute, University College London
- 2010 Chair of Forward Poetry Prize
- 2011 Inaugurated 'Poetry Workshop' on BBC Radio 4
Oxford Professor of Poetry
In 2009, Padel was elected Professor of PoetryOxford Professor of Poetry
The chair of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford is an unusual academic appointment, now held for a term of five years, and chosen through an election open to all members of Convocation, namely, all graduates and current academics of the university; in 2010, on-line voting was allowed....
at Oxford, the first woman since the Chair was founded in 1708. She received 297 votes, a higher percentage of the electorate (composed of Oxford University Members and alumni) than James Fenton
James Fenton
James Martin Fenton is an English poet, journalist and literary critic. He is a former Oxford Professor of Poetry.-Life and career:...
, who received 228 in 1994 and Christopher Ricks
Christopher Ricks
Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks, FBA is a British literary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford from 2004...
who received 214 votes in 2004. (The system now allows online voting, which enables many more to vote.) She resigned before taking office due to a media storm amid press allegations that she had "smeared" her main rival, Nobel-Prize-winner Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott
Derek Alton Walcott, OBE OCC is a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, writer and visual artist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 and the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2011 for White Egrets. His works include the Homeric epic Omeros...
who withdrew before the election. Walcott's candidacy had been controversial in the University from the start. Some counselled against, on grounds of Walcott’s university record of sexual harassment in the US; others dimissed this record as irrelevant since the post does not require student contact. Newspapers claimed Walcott was the favourite, but The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
pointed out this was a lazy understanding of a system which does not admit of favourites: the number of supporters listed in the University Gazette gives no clue to the final outcome.
American commentators attributed the storm to a gender
Gender
Gender is a range of characteristics used to distinguish between males and females, particularly in the cases of men and women and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Depending on the context, the discriminating characteristics vary from sex to social role to gender identity...
war, some British commentators to misogyny
Misogyny
Misogyny is the hatred or dislike of women or girls. Philogyny, meaning fondness, love or admiration towards women, is the antonym of misogyny. The term misandry is the term for men that is parallel to misogyny...
, and London's The Observer
The Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
newspaper to ‘toxicity of the metropolitan media
Mass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
’: the story "had everything, from sex claims to allegations of character assassination"; it allowed the press "simultaneously to pursue allegations in Walcott's past and criticize Padel for having mentioned these allegations as a source of voters' disquiet". Allegations against Padel began before the election when The Sunday Times
The Sunday Times
The Sunday Times is a British Sunday newspaper.The Sunday Times may also refer to:*The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times...
reported that photocopied pages of a University of Illinois publication, detailing cases of sexual harassment laid against Walcott at Boston University
Boston University
Boston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 4,000 faculty members and more than 31,000 students, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States and one of Boston's largest employers...
and Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, had been sent anonymously to Oxford academics. Walcott announced his withdrawal not through Oxford University but through London's newspaper The Evening Standard, which led a series of allegations against Padel picked up by other papers. Padel criticized the anonymous missives, said 'I wish he had not pulled out' and denied connection with them. There was no evidence to link her to them, but the press widely alleged her involvement. After her election, The Evening Standard published an email in which, responding to requests for information on pre-election opinion at Oxford, Padel had mentioned voters' unease at Walcott's university record. Evidence for this unease was in the public domain and there was no evidence that anything Padel had written led to any published article or to Walcott's withdrawal, but Padel resigned, saying she had been naive to mention disquiet about Walcott's teaching record, and apologizing for doing anything which could be misconstrued as against Walcott. Asked if she would encourage Walcott to stand again, Padel replied, "Yes, if he wants. I think he'd do good lectures." Letters to British newspapers criticized media handling of the affair. Letters to The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
complained of unfair denigration of Padel, "justly held in high regard for her poetry and teaching." A letter to The Times Literary Supplement
The Times Literary Supplement
The Times Literary Supplement is a weekly literary review published in London by News International, a subsidiary of News Corporation.-History:...
complained of unfair media pursuit of Walcott's past; a letter to The Times claimed that Oxford had "missed out for the worst of reasons on an inspirational teacher: Walcott removed the decision from the electorate by his own choice; Padel should not have been made to pay for his decision to confront neither his accusers nor his past." On Newsnight Review, the poet Simon Armitage
Simon Armitage
Simon Armitage CBE is a British poet, playwright, and novelist.-Life and career:Simon Armitage was born in Marsden, West Yorkshire. Armitage first studied at Colne Valley High School, Linthwaite, Huddersfield and went on to study geography at Portsmouth Polytechnic...
and poetry promoter Josephine Hart
Josephine Hart
Josephine Hart, Lady Saatchi was an Irish-born British writer, theatrical producer and television presenter...
expressed regret about her resignation. "Ruth's a good person," Simon Armitage said. "I don't think she should have resigned, she would have been good." Padel subsequently supported Geoffrey Hill
Geoffrey Hill
Geoffrey Hill is an English poet, professor emeritus of English literature and religion, and former co-director of the Editorial Institute, at Boston University. Hill has been considered to be among the most distinguished poets of his generation...
in the following election in which Hill was appointed.