My mother, Joyce Crick, who has died aged 95, was a lecturer, scholar and translator of German literature. She lived a life of determination, erudition and grit.
In 1958, Joyce began her academic career as a lecturer at University College London, where she taught German literature. She promoted a feminist and egalitarian ethos and conducted a vast number of language classes for those students who preferred her innovative approach. In 1990, she retired as a senior lecturer.
During this time she was a significant contributor to the field of scholarship on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s translations of Schiller into English, driving to archives all over Germany. Having grown up during the second world war, she became a committed European and one of her greatest joys in later life was being invited to the award ceremony of an honorary doctorate to an ex-student, Alan Smith. He was part of the team that founded the Erasmus student exchange programme.
After she retired, her scholarship and translation took off. The Oxford University Press approached her for a new translation of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1999), for which she was awarded the Schlegel-Tieck prize in 2000. This was followed up by a translation of Freud’s The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious (2002), a new edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy stories (2005), and, in 2009, a group of stories by Franz Kafka and a new translation of Metamorphosis.
Born in Neath, Glamorgan, she was the daughter of Maud (nee Vanstone), a teacher, and Ivor Morgan, a grocer, subpostmaster and hotelier. Music and poetry were a fixture of Joyce’s upbringing. She attended Neath grammar school and, in 1947, went to the University of London, where she studied German language and literature. She spent a year, in 1949, in postwar Germany, in Erlangen, where she taught literature to an interesting group: German students mixed in with former members of the Wehrmacht.
She then travelled widely in Canada and the US, where, in 1953, she married Bernard Crick, who later became a distinguished political scientist, and was studying at Harvard at the time; she had initially met him while at the University of London. They stayed for a while in Boston while he was teaching at Harvard, and at university summer schools, before returning to live in London. The marriage ended in divorce in 1976.
A lover of literature, theatre and music, particularly Mozart and Wagner, Joyce made regular pilgrimages to Glyndebourne and Bayreuth. She enjoyed travelling and loved visiting the Gower peninsula, where she used to spend childhood holidays.
Joyce is survived by her two sons, Tom and me, five grandchildren, Holly, Daisy, Rose, Lily and Joe, and her sister, Mary. A granddaughter, Georgia, predeceased her.
