Richard Anthony Sayce (1917-1977)

Richard was born on 11 January 1917. He was educated at Builth County School in Breconshire, at Jesus College, and at the Sorbonne, where he spent two years, one just before the war and one just after it had ended.

In between those two spells in Paris he served six years in the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. He was awarded the D.Phil. in 1950, three years after he had begun his thirty-three year association with Worcester College, Oxford, first as a lecturer, then in 1950 as a Fellow, and in 1958 as librarian.

He was made a University Reader in French Literature in 1966. He served scholarship in a variety of ways in addition to editing The Library. From 1950 to 1952 he was secretary to the Conference of University Teachers of French and was Chairman in the following year; in 1954 he played a large part in organising the International Congress of Modern Languages and Literatures at Oxford; and from 1954 to 1960 he was Secretary to the Modern Humanities Research Association.

Throughout his whole time at Oxford he was teaching undergraduates and supervising graduate students. He played a large part in setting up the Oxford B.Phil. in Comparative Literature and wrote the TES on comparative literature.

Richard married Olive in 1948 and had two daughters.

Richard published three books (Style in French prose: a method of analysis, Oxford, 1953; The French Biblical epic in the seventeenth century, Oxford, 1955; and The essays of Montaigne: a critical exploration, London and Evanston, 1972); and edition of Corneille's Polyeucte (Oxford, 1949); over thirty articles; and half-a-dozen contributions to Encyclopaedia Brittanica on French authors.

Many of his articles are bibliographical but he was particularly interested in the style of individual authors such as Racine, Moliere, and Montaigne, and in broader aspects of style.

He was Editor of The Library from 1965 to 1970.

At the time of his death he was working on a bibliography of sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century editions of Montaigne's Essays and had already made extensive tours of libraries in America, France, Italy, and other Western European countries.

Richard died at the age of 60 on 11 August 1977.