Marjorie Hope Nicolson

Literary critic, born in Yonkers, New York, USA. She revealed the effect of philosophy and scientific discoveries on 17th-c poetry in such scholarly works as Newton Demands the Muse (1947). She taught at Smith College (1926–41) and Columbia University (1941–62).

Marjorie Hope Nicolson (1894–1981), was born February 18, 1894 in Yonkers, New York, USA, the daughter of Charles Butler Nicolson, editor-in-chief of the Detroit Free Press during World War I and later that paper's correspondent in Washington, DC, and Lissie Hope Morris.

She graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.A.

Nicolson worked for her father at the newspaper for a while, as a drama critic, before becoming dean and professor at Smith College from 1929-1941. She left when she was hired as the first female graduate school professor at Columbia University, where she remained until 1962, eventually becoming chairman of the graduate department of English and Comparative Literature.

An authority on 17th-century literature and thought, she was the author of numerous books, listed below. Co., (1937) Newton Demands the Muse: Newton's Opticks and the Eighteenth Century Poets, Princeton University Press, (1946), (1966) Voyages to the Moon, Macmillan Co., (1948) The Breaking of the Circle, (1950) Science and Imagination, (1956); University of Washington Press, (1997) A Reader's Guide to John Milton, (1963); Syracuse University Press, (1998) Pepys' Diary and the New Science, (1965) Books are Not Dead Things, College of William and Mary, (1966) "This Long Disease, My Life": Alexander Pope and the Sciences, Princeton University Press, (1968) John Milton: A Reader's Guide to His Poetry, Octagon Books, (1971) The Conway Letters: The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More and Their Friends, 1642-1684, ed. by Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Oxford University Press, (1992) The Virtuoso, by Thomas Shadwell, ed. David Stuart Rodes, University of Nebraska Press, (1992) Zephyr and Boreas: Winds of Change in the Fiction of Ursula K.