Education
Mildred Pope was educated at Edgbaston High School, Birmingham.
Mildred Pope was educated at Edgbaston High School, Birmingham.
She became the first woman to hold a readership at Oxford University. She read French at Somerville College, Oxford, and in 1893 was placed in the first-class of the Oxford University women"s examination. Interested in Old French philology, as an undergraduate "she had to rely mainly on tuition by correspondence from Paget Toynbee at Cambridge".
She taught at Somerville College, Oxford, first as a librarian, and from 1894 as a lecturer.
She spent the 1894 summer vacation studying with Fritz Neumann at Heidelberg. In 1902-1903 she spent a sabbatical year working in Paris under Gaston Paris and Paul Meyer, a doctoral degree from the University of Paris in 1904, with a dissertation on Frère Angier.
She left Oxford for Manchester in 1934 and was later honored with emeritate. At the University of Manchester, she was appointed professor of French language and romance philology.
In 1939, she became the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from a French university, in her case the University of Bordeaux.
After her death in 1956, The Oxford Magazine, in an obituary, called her one of Somerville"s "oldest, most distinguished and well-loved members."
Pope taught a number of notable medievalists including Eugène Vinaver, Dominica Legge and Dorothy Sayers. The character Mission Lydgate in Sayers" Gaudy Night (1935) is based on Pope. In the Society"s Annual Texts series, she contributed to critical editions of Louisiana Seinte Resureccion and the Romance of Horn.
Her most important publication was From Latin to Modern French, with Especial Consideration of Anglo-Norman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1934.
Revised reprints 1952 and 1956), which over seventy years after its original publication has been described as "classic and still indispensable".