My wife, Valerie Letcher, who has died after a heart valve operation aged 80, was an academic who wrote extensively on pioneering British female novelists and commentators in South Africa and Canada. In particular, she highlighted the contributions of Harriet Ward (writing from the Cape between 1842 and 1848) and the Munro sisters (Georgina and Isabella).
Valerie, who spent most of her career in South Africa, was a member of the Black Sash movement in the 1980s, whose members would line up outside political meetings or in the street, wearing their black sashes, after racist legislation had been passed by the nationalist government of the time.
Born in Durban, Valerie was the daughter of Jack Fann, a road engineer, and Violet (nee Galagher), a homemaker. After attending Girls’ Collegiate, Pietermaritzburg, she studied English at Natal University Pietermaritzburg, graduating in 1962, and then took an education diploma. She travelled to the UK for a year to teach English at Ashford school in Kent, and in 1965 began a teaching post at Durban high school.
She and I met in Durban and married in 1967. We spent two years in Bristol while I was a researcher there at the university. Moving back to South Africa, we lived in Johannesburg and then Grahamstown and finally Durban. We also spent short periods in the UK, in Oxford, Exeter, London and Bath. It was in Grahamstown that Val spent 10 years as a staunch member of the Black Sash movement, opposing apartheid.
In 1990 Val became a lecturer in English at Edgewood College of Education, Natal University. As an educator she was committed to social justice and wherever she encountered racial prejudice among students, she felt compelled to teach them a better way of living. She chose texts that challenged and provoked – a favourite was Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness. At the same time, she was studying for her PhD, which she completed in 1996, on the subject of Ward, a British writer often mistaken for a South African.
Her work on Ward, the Munro sisters and other female British writers of the 19th century was published in journals throughout her time in Grahamstown, and after she retired in 2000.
We settled in Stratton on the Fosse, in Somerset, in 2003. Val’s retirement life revolved around walking (with the Mendip Ramblers), book clubs, reading, writing, gardening and entertaining friends and relatives.
Val was the consummate homemaker and wonderful mother to our three children. She was also a superb host. Her love of poetry was a mainstay of her intellectual life and many dinner parties were enlivened by a quotation from a guest that was completed by Val and vice versa.
She is survived by our children, Catherine, Christopher and Sarah, two grandchildren, Amy and Finn, her sister, Felicity, and me.
