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.
Lecturing in French at the University of Cape Town and bearing four children – a fifth was stillborn – did not prevent my mother from obtaining her doctorate at the Sorbonne. She simply took the two youngest children with her to Paris. Her thesis was later published as La Structure du Monde Imaginaire de Rimbaud (1972). When the family moved to Johannesburg, she joined the French department at the University of the Witwatersrand, becoming its head in 1978.
As professor, she continued to research and publish, by now mainly on Claudel, and hosted the biennial conference of the Association for French Studies in Southern Africa, which she helped to found. The French government, which made her Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques in 1978, promoted her to Officier in 1985.
On retirement in 1988 Marie persuaded Frank to live in her beloved Paris rather than his British birthplace, and immersed herself joyfully in French academic life. She published a critical edition of Claudel’s La Messe Là-bas in 2009, but, after 22 years in France, age forced them to move in 2010 to London, where my mother lamented that the subject of her life’s work was almost unknown, despite WH Auden’s famous couplet: “Time will pardon Paul Claudel, / Pardon him for writing well.”
But on hearing of my mother’s death, the writer’s grandson, François Claudel, praised her “remarkable knowledge of my grandfather’s work, that she admired and knew how to share”.
Frank died in 2014. Marie-Joséphine is survived by me, Richard, Christopher and Helen, eight grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.
