English professor receives international lifetime award

PULLMAN — Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, a longtime faculty member in the Department of English at Washington State University, received an international literary award June 30 at the 10th International D. H. Lawrence Conference, held in Santa Fe, N.M.  

Hyde received the Harry T. Moore Award for “Lifetime Achievement,” named for the leading Lawrence scholar in the United States during the decades following Lawrence’s 1930 death. She is one of 15 international scholars who have received the Harry T. Moore Award.

Hyde, who received a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, as national Sparks and Gibbs Fellow of Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society, is retiring this year after teaching for 34 years at WSU.

The conference was held in Santa Fe this year in order to recognize a successful nomination that placed the Lawrence ranch, the Kiowa Ranch at San Cristobal near Taos, N.M., on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004. Hyde was director of the conference, which drew scholars from five continents and 15 countries. She and Christine (Tina) Ferris authored the nomination, a five-year effort sponsored by the North American Lawrence Society and the University of New Mexico. 

Hyde is editor for the Cambridge Edition of Lawrence’s “Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays,” which will contain all of the essays Lawrence wrote about Southwestern and Mexican Native Americans during his residences in New Mexico and Oaxaca, Mexico. It is part of the Cambridge Edition of his works, now in more than 42 volumes and still ongoing.

Her first book, “The Risen Adam” (1992), was cited as a ground-breaking study in comparative mythology and typology; and her introduction (with Bonnie Frederick) to “Women and the Journey” (WSU Press, 1993), her introduction to Lawrence’s novel “The Plumed Serpent” (1995) and dozens of scholarly essays and articles (on George Eliot, the Brownings, Florence Farr, W. B. Yeats, Franz Kafka, W. H. Auden, Lawrence and others) were mentioned for their contributions to modernist, postcolonial, feminist and textual studies. Hyde was also represented in a recent MLA (Modern Language Association of America) book about the teaching of Lawrence. She gave a keynote presentation at the 6th International Lawrence Conference in Nottingham (United Kingdom) and plenary presentations in Ottawa (Canada), Taos, and Santa Fe; and she has served as president of the North American Lawrence Society.

John Worthen, director of the Lawrence Centre at the University of Nottingham, and Keith Sagar, University of Manchester, were keynote speakers at the Santa Fe conference. Hyde received the Harry T. Moore Award along with Sagar.

Hyde joined 15 other international scholars who have received the Harry T. Moore Award: James C. Cowan, founder of the D. H. Lawrence Review and the Lawrence Society of North America, which is allied to the MLA; Mark Spilka, Brown University, well-known literary critic and editor of Novel; James T. Boulton, University of Birmingham (UK), and F. Warren Roberts, University of Texas at Austin, general editors of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Lawrence;  John Worthen, director of the Lawrence Centre at the University of Nottingham, editor of many Cambridge Edition volumes, and biographer of Lawrence, Coleridge and the Wordsworth circle; Emile Delavenay, University of Nice, biographer and critic; Ginette Katz-Roy, University of Paris-X, celebrated feminist and cultural critic and editor of “Etudes lawrenciennes”; H. M. Daleski, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, critical writer on Dickens, Hardy, Lawrence and others;  Mark Kinkead-Weekes, University of Kent, writer on 18th century figures, the Brontes, Poe, Whitman, Golding and Lawrence, a Cambridge Edition editor and biographer; Takeo Iida, Kurume University in Japan, author and president of the Lawrence Society of Japan; L. D. Clark, University of Arizona, a novelist, critic and Cambridge Edition editor; Michael Squires, Virginia Polytechnic and State University, an expert on pastoral literature and a Cambridge Edition editor; Keith Cushman, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, author and DHLR associate editor;  Dennis Jackson, University of Delaware, a longtime editor and author; and Keith Sagar, University of Manchester, author of the new ecological criticism “Literature and the Crime Against Nature” (2005), a Cambridge Edition editor and a critic and scholar on Ted Hughes, Romantic literature and Lawrence.