Professor Elizabeth Read Foster, M.A., Ph.D., F.R.Hist.S.

Elizabeth Read was born in Chicago on 26 June 1912, the daughter of historian, Conyers Read. She grew up in Villanova, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Vassar in 1933. The early thirties in the USA were blighted by the Depression and a number of Elizabeth’s classmates were forced to withdraw through lack of money, so she organized an undergraduate effort to raise funds and was successful in re-instating all of them. She received an MA in sociology from Columbia University in 1934 and, in 1938, with support from a Vassar fellowship, a PhD in history from Yale. It was at Yale that she began to specialize in English parliamentary history but her studies were put on hold after her marriage in that year to Richard W Foster, a bookseller, and the birth of their four sons. Read Foster returned to academic life in 1953 at Ursinus Collegeville, PA, and then as visiting associate professor at the University of Delaware from1962-3. Her first book, Proceedings in Parliament, 1610, 2 volumes (1965) established her as a leading scholar of Stuart England and she was appointed Research Fellow and Acting Director of the Yale Center for Parliamentary History. Her years atYale were enjoyable and fruitful and her association with the Center’s editorial board and advisory council lasted throughout her life. In 1979 she was awarded Yale Graduate School’s Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal for outstanding achievement in scholarship, teaching and academic administration. Read Foster moved to Bryn Mawr in 1966 and spent the rest of her career there as professor of history, retiring as emeritus in 1981. She attached equal importance to scholarship and teaching; she was the first dean of the Bryn Mawr Graduate School (1966-70) which she reorganized as the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (dean 1970-3) and her efforts in obtaining federal funds for education, together with financial support for part-time study, were remarkably successful. Read Foster wrote numerous articles in learned journals and published The House of Lords, 1603-49 (1983) and two studies of Henry Elsyng, clerk of the parliaments 1621-35: The Painful Labour of Mr Elsyng (1972) and Judicature in Parliament by Henry Elsyng, Clerk of the Parliaments (1991). In civic and private life Read Foster was active in supporting educational opportunites for women. She died, aged eighty-seven, in Pennsylvania on 27 November 1999.