The Times/1914/Obituary/Edith Sichel

The death of Miss Edith Sichel, which occurred on Thursday after a few days' illness while staying away from home, will come as a blow to many friends in all ranks of life.

It may be difficult for them to connect the thought of death with a nature of vitality as hers; for, although never very strong, she spent herself so eagerly in the service of others that she seemed to quicken the life of all who came into touch with her. She had both wit and humour in a marked degree; her power of grasping a subject and viewing it in its broadest light was such as is generally thought characteristic of the male rather than the female intelligence. Thee qualities, and her brilliant and terse style. give a special value to her historical works.

Beginning with "The Story of Two Salons" (1895) and "The Household of the Lafayettes" (1897), it was not until 1901 that Miss Sichel's minute study of one period bore its first fruit, in "Women and Men of the French Renaissance." This was followed by "Catherine de Medici and the French Reformation" (1905) and "The Later Years of Catherine de Medici" (1908). Her admirable biography of Montaigne appeared three years after the last of these and only a few weeks ago the final results of her studies were condensed into a handbook of small dimensions, but astonishing completeness, on "The Renaissance." In 1903 she wrote her share of a fictitious series of letters with the Right Hon. George Russell, called "Mr. Woodhouse's Correspondence." She had a genius for friendship, and this as well as her other characteristics is well illustrated in "The Life and Letters of Alfred Ainger" (1906). Another memorial of a long and intimate friendship was the memoir she prefixed to her selection of "Gathered Leaves from the Prose of Mary E. Coleridge" (1910), and a third, an introductory memoir to the "Poems" of the Hon. Emily Lawless was reviewed in the Literary Supplement of The Times a very short time ago.

Besides her literary work, she devoted a large proportion of her energies to the welfare of the young. Her earliest philanthropic work was at the Whitechapel of the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants, where she came under the influence of the late Canon Barnett, who became her lifelong friend. For the last year she had been an accredited visitor at Holloway Prison, where she exercised a most important influence on young women. Miss Sichel was a valued contributor to The Times and to the Literary Supplement.