Billie Andrew Inman

Billie Andrew Inman, now retired from The University of Arizona, has been writing articles on Walter Pater since 1962, when she published "The Organic Structure of Marius the Epicurean", in The Philogical Quarterly, Volume 41. Her latest article, "How Walter Pater Might Have Countered Charges That He Misused Sources: A Dialogue Between Graduate Student Walter Pater and Professor Samantha Marks at Great State University, U.S.A, in 2003" will appear in Nineteenth-Century Prose 35/2: Fall 2008. The article of hers that has attracted most attention is "Estrangement and Connection: Walter Pater, Benjamin Jowett, and William M. Hardinge" in Pater in the 1990s, published by the ELT Press in 1991. Her favorite is "The Intellectual Context of Walter Pater's 'Conclusion'", in Prose Studies Special Issue on Walter Pater: An Imaginative Sense of Fact 4 (May 1981), reprinted in Walter Pater, Modern Critical Views, introduced by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1985). She was Co-Editor of The Pater Newsletter, with Laurel Brake,1977-1989, 1995-1997, and Bibliographer for this publication from 1998 to 2004. She has written two books on Pater's originality and his indebtedness to other writers: Walter Pater's Reading: A Bibliography of His Library Borrowings and Literary References: 1858-1873 (New York: Garland, 1981) and Walter Pater and His Reading: 1874-1877, with a Bibliography of His Library Borrowings, 1878-1894 (Garland, 1990). She helped unveil the blue plaque honoring Walter Pater and Clara Pater at No. 2 Bradmore Road, Oxford, on 3 July 2004. The features of Pater's writings that have interested her most over the years are his philosophy, his ideas about religion, and his unique style.