Obituary: Lia Raitt (1932–2023)
2023; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 39; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/port.2023.a918430
ISSN2222-4270
AutoresCláudia Pazos Alonso, T. F. Earle, Stephen Parkinson, Claire Williams,
ResumoObituaryLia Raitt (1932–2023) Claudia Pazos-Alonso, T. F. Earle, Stephen Parkinson, and Claire Williams Lia Noémia Rodrigues Correia Raitt was a much-loved member of the Oxford Sub-Faculty of Portuguese for many decades. Her high academic standards went hand in hand with a nurturing nature that led her to think of her students as an extended family, to whom she invariably referred as her 'filhos' and 'filhas'. Lia was born in Macau, on 25 May 1932. When she was still very young, the family moved to Portugal and she grew up in Paredes (Lisbon). Her father, Vergílio Correia, was a career naval officer, who was responsible for the maintenance of port installations in the Portuguese colonies in the Far East. Her exposure to different cultures while growing up was further enhanced by the fact that the family welcomed into their home a young girl, a Jewish refugee from Germany, during the Second World War. Her later experiences in the US state of Georgia on a Rotary Scholarship, in the 1950s, when segregation was still common, gave her a broad view of racial issues. She remained a staunch and principled Catholic throughout her own long life, and her conservative social and political views often infused her teaching. She enrolled at the Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Lisbon, where she completed a degree in English and German in 1955, with a thesis on Gertrud von Le Fort. This was an unconventional choice on at least two counts: it was a thesis on an author who was still alive, and moreover a female one. Le Fort, however, had converted to Catholicism; her faith and interest in ethics would no doubt have strongly appealed to Lia. At Lisbon she was one of many who were introduced to modern linguistic ideas by the charismatic figure of Luís Filipe Lindley Cintra. Lia qualified as a secondary school teacher, and taught in Portuguese schools, including Liceu Passos Manuel — the name of the famous forward-looking nineteenth-century thinker was auspicious. At the height of the dictatorship, when young women were expected to marry and produce children, she remained determined to remain financially independent and expand her horizons. Her intellectual ambition, love of books and enthusiasm for Portuguese culture may have been part of the reason why she applied to become a 'Portuguese Lector', funded by the Instituto de Alta Cultura (later [End Page 114] renamed ICALP and subsequently Instituto Camões). Working in a system which encouraged leitores to move from one university to another, she spent over a decade teaching Portuguese to many generations of UK undergraduates, at the Universities of Bristol (1966–67), Cambridge (1967–72), Oxford (1972–76) and Southampton (1976–77). As her career as an ICALP leitora came to an end, Lia settled in Oxford and continued teaching on and off (but mainly on) for the Sub-Faculty of Portuguese until she reached the age of 70. She also found the time to return to secondary school teaching, at St Clare's School, and the European School in Culham, where she taught the International Baccalaureate. At the same time as teaching, Lia completed an MLitt at the University of Oxford, under the supervision of Luís de Sousa Rebelo. A monograph based on her Master's thesis was published in 1983 under the title Garrett and the English Muse. Her interest in language not only informed her teaching but enabled her to be involved in lexicographical projects such as the Oxford Portuguese Minidictionary (1996) and a 1990s collaborative project for creating interactive computer-based language materials (Língua Portuguesa — Ensino Assistido por Computador) with participants from Oxford and the Portuguese Centro de Linguística. She was an early adopter of computers and word processing, which she relied on and detested in equal measure. Lia was a well-established presence in Oxford. She married Alan Raitt, a French don at Magdalen, in 1974. After his death in 2006, she took the lead in ensuring that Alan's intellectual legacy was preserved, working closely with colleagues in the French sub-faculty in the process. This resulted in the posthumous publication of Alan's Flaubert's First Novel...
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