My mother, Marie-Joséphine Whitaker, who has died aged 97, devoted her life to the study of French literature. She was honoured by the French government for her research on Rimbaud, Baudelaire and, her greatest passion, the work of the Catholic poet, essayist and dramatist Paul Claudel.
She was born Marie-Joséphine Polakiewicz in what was then eastern Poland, now south-western Ukraine, and forced to flee when the Soviet Union invaded in 1940. Her parents, Stanislaus and Romana, were members of the landed gentry. Their home language was French, and Marie-Joséphine used to describe herself as “Polish by birth, French by culture”. Yet her academic career was spent in South Africa, where she found herself as a war refugee. She met my father, Frank Whitaker, when he was sent to her to brush up his French after returning from war service, and they were married in 1947.
