The Telegraph brings two fascinating obituaries, one an academic, the other a woman who embraced the life of her husband, a lawyer who was to be posted to various British colonies in his career.
Professor Mary Boyce was an expert on Zoroastrianism who studied it and its origins exhaustively.
[She] argued that it was Zarathustra, the religion's founder, who had instituted the original form of this and other rites still observed by the Zoroastrians in traditional Iranian centres such as Sharifabad. On this basis she justified the use of both contemporary religious practice and the texts written in Old and Middle Iranian languages as sources of equal importance for reconstructing the whole system of the religion.
Mary Boyce was the first to attempt to write a unified history of the religion from its prehistoric origins to the present day, filling in gaps in earlier treatments, such as the 500-year Parthian period or the initial 1,000 years after the coming of Islam. This historical approach underpinned her monumental History of Zoroastrianism, of which three volumes have appeared and the fourth is approaching completion.
Doubtless, an essential contribution, despite debilitating back problems, due to which
she did much of her teaching in the study of her flat in Highgate, lying on her back. She usually asked visitors to come in the early afternoon for tea and used a special cup with a spout so that she could drink while reclining. The ensuing discussions went on for many hours, occasionally until midnight.
That qualifies to make her a "feminine genius," n'est-ce pas?
June Knox-Mawer made the best of a daunting situation, beginning with her husband's first assignment, to Aden.
[She] prepared herself by reading TE Lawrence, Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark and made up her mind to love the place despite its reputation among old colonial hands as "the nearest thing to hell". She shouldered the "white woman's burden of sitting through endless dinners where you had heard everybody's stories a hundred times," but was impatient to get to know the place and the people.
Working as a stringer for the Daily Express, she began making adventurous forays into the interior. Her sympathetic reports on the Yemeni frontier raids and the rising tide of nationalist feeling against the British did not go down well at Government House, but led to her becoming a firm favourite with the feudal native princes and their harems, many of whom had never met a western woman before. "Riding at dawn with the men, singing and dancing with the women. That was the real me," she recalled.
She later parleyed her decades of experience into a Radio 4 show called "Women's Hour" which had an enormous following.
Fluent and direct of manner, with a talent for putting interviewees at their ease, June Knox-Mawer also presented travel features and documentaries and concerto chats with musicians. She possessed one of the most distinctive voices on the airwaves and was once selected as having the best woman's voice on radio.
Bully for them both, and may their souls rest in peace.
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