Obituaries: Celia Britton, ​pioneering scholar who pushed the boundaries of French studies

Celia Britton, who has died at the age of 78, was a pioneering scholar and teacher in contemporary French studies, responsible for some of the most significant developments in the field in recent years. Appointed in 1991 to the Carnegie Professorship in French at the University of Aberdeen, one of the longest-established and most prestigious chairs in the subject in the UK, Celia remained in that role until 2002, turning her department into an internationally renowned hub for research in French studies.

Following research at the beginning of her career on the nouveau roman and French film, Celia would go on, across more than three decades, to publish a substantial body of writing on French Caribbean literature, thought and culture, most notably on the Martinican author and thinker Edouard Glissant. It was in particular during her time in Aberdeen that she played a central part in the development of postcolonial studies within modern languages. Celia’s brilliance as a researcher and her ability to provide emerging areas of enquiry with the theoretical and conceptual rigour they required were widely celebrated, not least with her election to a fellowship of the British Academy in 2000 and appointment by the French government to the grade of Chevalier in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques in 2003.

For the first 20 years of her career, in books including Claude Simon: Writing the Visible (1987) and The Nouveau Roman: Fiction, Theory and Politics (1992), Celia built a reputation as a leading critic of the avant-garde fiction of writers including Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras. However, by the mid-1990s her interests had shifted to the French Caribbean, the region whose literature and culture she would study for the rest of her life. French studies was at that time still predominantly canonical and metropolitan in focus. Celia’s work would challenge this situation considerably. In two books written while she was in Aberdeen, Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance (1999) and Race and the Unconscious: Freudianism in French-Caribbean Thought (2002), she brought a remarkable theoretical and conceptual rigour to the study of Caribbean literature and thought in French. Celia’s contribution was twofold: not only did she steer the field of Francophone studies towards much-needed theoretical rigour, but also revealed the Anglocentrism of postcolonial studies by opening it to voices from other language traditions. Two subsequent volumes, The Sense of Community in French Caribbean Fiction (2008) and Language and Literary Form in French Caribbean Writing (2014), revealed the breadth of Celia’s interests as her attention extended to Maryse Condé and other writers from Martinique and Guadeloupe. One of the real strengths of Celia’s work was her ability to draw into conversation different writers and thinkers, creating – not least through her championing of Glissant – a sense of the compelling need to take French Caribbean literature and thought seriously as a cohesive contribution to world culture in its own right.

Celia Britton was the Carnegie Professor in French at the University of Aberdeen for over a decade

Celia was born in March 1946, daughter of the educationalist James Nimmo Britton and art teacher Jessie Muriel Britton. She studied modern and medieval languages at New Hall, Cambridge (now Murray Edwards College) and graduated in 1969, winning a University Prize for her top first. In her second year at Cambridge, she met history student Lyle Conquest, with whom she was to live until his death in 2019. Staying on at New Hall, she studied for a postgraduate diploma in linguistics, before moving to the University of Essex, where she completed her doctoral dissertation in literary stylistics in 1973. From 1972 to 1974, while still studying for her PhD, Celia was employed as a lecturer in French at King’s College London. From 1974 to 1991, she was a lecturer in French studies at the University of Reading.

In 1991, at a time when there were very few women professors, Celia was appointed to the University of Aberdeen. During her tenure lasting over a decade, she founded and directed a dynamic Centre for Francophone Studies, which not only attracted some of the most talented students and scholars in this area to work at Aberdeen, but also ensured the visits of a series of key authors in the field, including Glissant himself, who had by that stage become a good friend and visited her home in Stonehaven. Teaching – whether at undergraduate or postgraduate level – was always as important to Celia as her research. She was an extraordinarily gifted educator and cared deeply about all her students. It was at Aberdeen that she set up courses on Francophone Literature and Culture, which were particularly innovative at the time. Celia’s final appointment was as Professor of French at University College London, a post held between 2003 and 2011.

Those who knew Celia well or worked closely with her valued her warmth, intellectual generosity and fierce sense of loyalty. Her scholarship was complemented consistently by indefatigable service to the profession, always leavened by her characteristic wisdom and no-nonsense approach to ensuring that even the most thankless tasks were done well. Celia was an exceptional president of the Society for French Studies between 1996 and 1998, hosting the highly successful 50th anniversary conference at the Sorbonne in September 1997, with keynotes including Julia Kristeva and Régis Debray. Chair of the RAE French Panel in 2001, she also served successfully as chair of her section at the British Academy.

Retirement to Hove allowed Celia to devote more time to her interests, including photography and cinema. It also provided the space for her to develop her profile as a translator, notably of the work of Glissant. Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity and Treatise on the Whole-World appeared as part of the Glissant Translation Project in 2020. Her English-language version of Glissant’s La Cohée du Lamentin, completed shortly before her death, will be published posthumously.

Lyle Conquest, her husband, predeceased her. Celia is survived by her sister, ceramicist Alison Britton, and two nieces.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Obituaries

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