Christina Britzolakis obituary

Christina Britzolakis was born in Africa but had an attachment to the cosmopolitan traditions of literary modernism that led her to a passionate sense of European identity Photograph: from family/unknown

My wife, Christina Britzolakis, who has died aged 60 of cancer, taught English literature at the University of Warwick, where she worked from the early 1990s until ill health forced her to retire last year.

A highly talented scholar, she had a fierce intelligence and love of learning that took her from a childhood in Africa to a doctorate at the University of Oxford and then on to her later teaching career.

She was born in Bulawayo, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), one of the three daughters of George Britzolakis, a railway worker, and Chrissoula, a housewife, both of whom were born in Crete. Her paternal grandfather was killed in the German reprisals that followed the invasion of Crete in 1941, and her parents lived through the privations of the occupation.

Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning by Christina Britzolakis (1999) Photograph: from family/unknown

After attending Townsend high school in Bulawayo, Christina went on to obtain a first class degree in English from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa before moving in 1985 to the UK, where she gained an MPhil and then a DPhil while at New College, Oxford. Her doctoral research was on Sylvia Plath and the modernist tradition, and formed the basis of her 1999 book Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning.

In 1992 she secured a temporary lectureship in English literature at the University of York, which led to a full-time lectureship in the English department at Warwick from 1993 onwards. We met through a mutual friend and married in 1997.

Christina had a strong attachment to the cosmopolitan traditions of literary modernism that led to a passionate sense of European identity, and she travelled widely in southern Europe. She was devastated at the 2016 UK vote to leave the European Union, experiencing it almost as a personal form of rejection. She held a Greek passport and loved the Greek people, their language and literature.

The blow of the referendum took place just as she was coming to terms with a diagnosis of chordoma, a rare and virulent skull-based cancer that was eventually to take her life.

She is survived by me, our sons, Alex and Nick, her mother and her two sisters, Anna and Stella.