Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/462

 OBITUARY.

MARIAN EMILY ROALFE COX.

1860-1916.

was a Londoner by birth and descent. Born in Mount Street, 30th August, 1860, her childhood and early life were passed in the old house which had been the home of her family for three generations in the once-pretty suburban village of Streatham. Then came ten years spent in Kensington, and, after the successive deaths of both parents, some years of a spinster's solitary flat in Westminster. An uneventful life, but rich in interests—musical, literary, and scientific.

Those whose memories of the Folk-Lore Society go back to the last decades of the nineteenth century will vividly remember the pale, fragile-looking girl who, closely chaperoned by her dignified Early Victorian mother, was a regular attendant at its meetings. It was in 1888 that Miss Cox joined the Society, and she at once expressed a wish to undertake definite work on its behalf. Folktales were then among the leading preoccupations of students. The question of independent origin versus transmission was eagerly debated, and it was supposed that analysis and comparison might disclose the birthplace and habitat of each story. People were busily making abstracts of the various published collections to this end. Miss Cox took part in the work, and presently—at the suggestion, we believe, of Sir Laurence (then Mr.) Gomme—undertook the task of collecting and classifying all attainable variants of Cinderella.

It was a work for which she was well fitted. She was an excellent linguist; she read the classics in the originals, spoke modern Greek fluently, and was acquainted with the principal European languages and their literature. Oriental and Continental scholars, as well as the leading English folklorists, readily lent their aid to