Mitzi Ouida Myers
Biography
Early life and academic career
Myers was born on October 9, 1939, in Sulphur Springs, Texas.
As a young child, she was "a lover of reading and of books".
She obtained her BA (1961) and MA (1962) at East Texas State College and worked as a teaching assistant at
Rice University, before obtaining her PhD there in 1969.
Her doctoral dissertation
Aspects of William Godwin's reputation in the 1790's was supervised by Carroll Camden.
Originally an assistant professor at University of California, Santa Barbara from 1966 to 1973, Myers later started working at California State University in 1974.
Scholarly career
Having become interested in the field while at Rice, Myers specialized in children's literature as a scholar.
Her status as a children's literature expert was widely recognized throughout the world,
and Naomi Wood said that Myers was "unquestionably
the founding mother of eighteenth-century children's literature criticism".
Her contributions to children's literature studies included extending the start of children's literature beyond the 1865 publication of
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; encouraging the study of book copy defacements as "the hidden history of childhood"; editing
; and making contributions to the
Cambridge Companion to Children's Literature and
Encyclopedia Americana.
Myers also studied Georgian era women authors like Maria Edgeworth, Hannah More, and Mary Wollstonecraft, and considered Edgeworth her favorite.
Personal life
On March 14, 1967, Myers married Dennis Allen Hengeveld, a contemporary from Rice who later became an English professor at Cal State Fullerton.
They were married until his death on May 10, 1983.
She also had a brother, whom she survived, as well as a sister who outlived her.
Myers reportedly "delighted in silver jewelry, fast driving, and an absolute accuracy of annotation".
Death and legacy
On August 13, 2000, Myers's house in Fullerton, California, was damaged in a fire.
Her four Edgeworth manuscripts in progress at the time – two academic books and two novel annotated versions – were lost in the fire, as was the majority of her personal library of 35,000 volumes, reportedly including rare books and "nearly all of them annotated".
Myers, whose sister Patsy told the
Los Angeles Times that the books "were like children to her", repeatedly reentered the burning house in an attempt to save the books, suffering second- and third-degree burns and pneumonia as a result.
She went on medical leave afterwards and temporarily moved to
Anaheim Hills, where she died on November 5, 2001, due to complications from the pneumonia, aged 62.
The Lion and the Unicorn called Myers "one of her generation's most far-ranging and rigorous scholars" in an obituary for her.
