Margery Durham

Margery was born in Nashville, TN., where her father was employed as an engineer with the Tennessee Valley Authority. Within a few months of her birth, the family moved to the
Chicago area where they resided for several years before moving to New Rochelle, a suburb of
New York City, and then to nearby Pelham, where Margery attended the high school from which
she graduated in 1951. Due to her brilliant performance as a student and in special qualifying
exams, she was awarded a full four-year scholarship to attend Cornell University, but after her
first year she sought a less impersonal academic setting and transferred to a small Liberal Arts
institution near her Pelham home, the College of New Rochelle, from which she graduated with
honors (BA in American History) in 1955.
After graduation from college, Margery worked for a time as copy editor for several
publications (The National Geographic, for one) in Washington, D.C., and New York City. In
New York she began attending evening classes at NYU, eventually enrolling full time,
completing a Masters degree in English Literature before moving on to a doctoral program, again
in English Literature, at Indiana University in Bloomington. She was awarded the PhD at IU in
the Spring of 1964, and after being courted by several distinguished Universities, she chose the
University of Minnesota in Minneapolis where, aside from occasional over-seas stints, she stayed
for the remainder of her thirty-year career with the Department of English Language and
Literature, a much beloved mentor to many, many, devoted students.
In 1969, Margery married Lonnie James Durham with whom she had been a graduate
student at Indiana and who had, by a stroke of marvelous good fortune for him, been hired the
following year to teach in the same department as Margery at the U of Minnesota. Their
relationship as colleagues was a delightful mix of collaboration and competition, underlined and
punctuated by loving wit. Margery had the good fortune in her career to teach and write about the authors she had loved for nearly her whole life: Charles Dickens, Matthew Arnold, Alfred
Tennyson, and, of course, George Eliot and the Bronte sisters. At the same time, she was able to
sustain an amazingly rich family and social life. She bore two beautiful daughters, Alice and
Emily, and was a dear companion to her step-son James. She was a terrific cook, played a
respectable piano, and had taken up the violin before a neurological affliction began to interfere
with her muscular control.
In the Autumn of 1996 Margery and Lonnie retired from academe, left Minneapolis, and
came to live in Lonnie's native state, Montana, in Polson, a small community on the shores of
Flathead Lake just south of Glacier National Park. Very soon after settling into their new home,
Margery became involved with a local arts group, The Sandpiper Gallery, and began drawing and painting with this new group of friends. Soon there were others: her church friends, her bridge friends, her political action friends–all in addition to the opportunities in the area for outdoor pleasures; fishing and swimming in the lake, hiking and camping in the mountains. Her
retirement life was near ideal up to the point when her affliction, a rare form of palsy related to
Parkinson's, began to rob her of her ability to participate in the physical activities she so loved.
Still, with her bridge group, her artist friends and her literary interests, Margery's life remained
rich and varied until near the very end. Though she had lost the ability to speak in the last year of
her life, it is very likely she would have liked to have said something very close to a sentiment
expressed by Albert Camus: "In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was within me an
invincible summer."
Margery is survived by her husband, Lonnie Durham of Polson, her daughters, Alice
McGrath and Emily Durham-Shapiro, her grandson, Rory McGrath, and step-son, James Durham, all of Minneapolis-St Paul, and her sister Mary Waterbury of Silver Springs, Maryland. A communion mass will be held in her memory at St Andrews Episcopal Chruch in Polson on
Saturday, October 6th at 1:00 PM.

Read Margery Durham's Obituary and Guestbook on www.groganfuneralhome.com.