Last week, we received an uncharacteristically early Christmas card from Frances Austin. But the card was not to wish us a merry Christmas: it was accompanied by a note from her nephew to say that she had died on 30 September, the result of a fall from which she never recovered.

Frances was a pioneer in historical sociolinguistics. Based on a PhD thesis from the 1970s and supervised by Noel Osselton, she published an edition of the Clift family correspondence, a lower working-class family from Bodmin, Cornwall, followed by several articles on their language. Fantastic material for anyone interested in how men and women with barely any formal education wrote, and also demonstrating how one of them, William Clift, attained standard English language use through reading literature and other informal ways of educating himself. But she did not only analyse their language: she also studied their letter writing habits, discussing their use of epistolary formulas as well as the question whether they had had a letter-writing manual at their disposal. A comparable article is the one on Julia Miles, the poet William Barnes’s wife, on whom Frances’s husband Bernard Jones was a specialist. Indispensible publications for anyone study Late Modern English letter-writing practice.

She also contributed several entries to the ODNB, on William Clift’s son William Home Clift, but also on the 18th-century grammarians Daniel Fenning, James Greenwood and William Ward. And in addition she was for many years responsible for the interactive feature called Points of Modern English Syntax (later Usage), which she had taken over from Noel Osselton in the 1980s. The idea behind the feature was to ask readers of the journal English Studies to contribute their “thoughts” on debated and debatable language issues, and reading the different items, we find comments from people like John Honey as well as, of course, Noel Osselton. Her latest contribution dates from 2010 (ES 91/2, 170–179).

Frances died at the age of 88, and her ashes will be scattered at Stourhead, a lovely National Trust park in Wiltshire, close to where she lived and where her husband’s ashes lie scattered as well.

Her In Memoriam for English Studies is now available online.

Here is a list of most of her publications (and please let me know if anything is missing):

1973    Epistolary Conventions in the Clift Family Correspondence. English Studies 54. 9–22, 129–140. Reprinted in: Mats Rydén, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Merja Kytö (eds.) A Reader in Early Modern English (1998). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 319‒347.

1983    (ed.) The Letters of William Home Clift, 1803–1832. Sturminster Newton (Dorset): Meldon House.

1983    Robert Clift of Bodmin, Able Seaman, 1790–1799. Sturminster Newton (Dorset): Meldon House. (41 pp.)

1985    Relative which in late 18th century usage: The Clift family correspondence. In Roger Eaton, Olga Fischer, Willem Koopman and Frederike van der Leek (eds.), Papers from the 4th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 15–29.

1989    The Language of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Basingstoke/London: Macmillan.

1990    Text as social indicator: The letters of Julia Miles Barnes. In Jacek Fisiak. Historical Linguistics and Philology, Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton. 29–43.

1990    ICEHL at Helsinki, 23–26 May 1990. The Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas Newsletter 14 (1990): 37–38.

1991    (ed.) The Clift Family Correspondence, Sheffield: CECTAL.

1991    The Channel in the Clift family correspondence. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 292. 97–105.

1991    Points of Modern English Syntax 1968 – 1983. In Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade and John Frankis (eds.), Language. Usage and Description. Studies Presented to Noel Osselton on the Occasion of his Retirement. Amsterdan/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. 173–194.

1994    The effect of exposure to Standard English: The language of William Clift. In Dieter Stein and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds.), Towards a Standard English 1600–1800. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 285–313.

1996    Lindley Murray’s “Little Code of Elementary Instruction”. In Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (ed.), Two Hundred Years of Lindley Murray. Münster: Nodus Publikationen. 45–61.

2000    Letter writing in a Cornish community in the 1790s. In David Barton and Nigel Hall (eds) (2000). Letter Writing as a Social Practice. Amsterdam/Phila­delphia: John Benjamins. 43–61.

2004    “Heaving this Importunity: The Survival of Opening Formulas in Letters in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”. Historical Sociolinguistics and Sociohistorical Linguistics 4. http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/hsl_shl/heaving_­this­_im­­p­ortunity.htm.

2010    A Chertsey Childhood, 1935–1945: Reminiscences. Gillingham: Meldon House (80 pp.).