Ian Duncan MacKillop

Background

Ian MacKillop was born on April 18, 1939, in Bromley, United Kingdom to the family of a Bank of England official who died young, and a mother to whom he remained exasperatedly devoted until her death in her nineties in 2001.

Education

Ian MacKillop was educated at Dulwich College. After attending Downing College, Cambridge, he completed his doctorate in seventeenth-century French criticism at Leicester University.

Career

In 1968 Ian MacKillop was appointed by William Empson (about whom he cherished a collection of outrageous anecdotes) to a lectureship in the English department at Sheffield, where he remained until his death, only two months away from taking up a Fellowship at Harvard during which he was to have completed an edition of John Keats's letters with commentary for Penguin.

Ian MacKillop published an arresting range of essays - on François Truffaut, on children's fiction, on Kingsley Amis - but it was not until 1986, after a year as Visiting Professor at the University of Southern California, that he published his first book, The British Ethical Societies, a history of that worthy conglomeration of pious and public-spirited philanthropists who gathered for their secular worship in the late 19th century in South Place in the City of London.

Ian MacKillop followed this with his magnum opus, his 500-page biography F.R. Leavis: a life in criticism, published in 1995. Shrewd, even-handed, revisionist, wonderfully detailed and of exemplary scholarship, it displayed its subject firmly to posterity and its author at his judicious and respectable best.

Ian MacKillop died of a heart attack on May 28, 2004 (aged 65) in Litton, Derbyshire, United Kingdom.

Achievements

• Ian MacKillop managed to achieve recognition as author and educator. He is remembered as a biographer of F. R. Leavis whose legacy is described in MacKillop's book on the subject considered one of the leading on the topic.

Works

More photos

• book

  • British Cinema in the 1950's: An Art in Peacetime

    (Offers a startling re-evaluation of what has until now be...)

    2003
  • The British Ethical Societies

    (Originally published in 1986, this was a study of the Bri...)

    1986
  • F.R. Leavis: Essays and Documents

    (A collection of new studies on one of the best known and ...)

    1995
  • F.R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism

    (Ian MacKillop captures all of F.R. Leavis, one of the mos...)

    1997
  • Free Spirits 2000

Personality

Ian MacKillop was a master of creative lateral thinking before the concept was even coined, and was always trying out new pedagogic methods. He could be exuberant, stubborn to the point of bloody-mindedness, had a taste for the absurd and for human comedy, and found the increasing bureaucracy of university life, by turns, hilarious and dispiriting. Ian MacKillop had a gift for lifelong friendship, and his lifelong friends loved him accordingly.

Connections

Ian MacKillop and his partner of 15 years, Rosie Ford, had moved to a converted 18th-century pub in Litton Dale, Derbyshire nit long before his death. He had three children: Carla, the daughter of his first marriage, to Anita Burns, and James and Edward, the sons of his later marriage, to Jane Rawlingson.

ex-wife:

Anita Burns

Daughter:

Carla MacKillop

ex-wife:

Jane Rawlingson

Son:

James MacKillop

Son:

Edward MacKillop

Partner:

Rosie Ford

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 166 This volume of Contemporary Authors contains biographical information on approximately 300 modern writers.
  1998