Margery Bailey (1891–1963)

Margery Bailey was born in Santa Cruz, California and attended Stanford University, where she received her B.A. in 1914 and M.A. in English in 1916. She joined the faculty of the Department of English at Stanford as an instructor in 1914 and rose to full professor of English Literature, becoming the first women to achieve tenure as a professor there in 1937. Her many students during her long career there included John Steinbeck. In 1920, she took a sabbatical
and studied at Yale University, from which she later earned a PhD. In 1928, she edited The Hypochondriac: Being the Seventy Essays by the Celebrated Biographer James Boswell, Appearing in the London Magazine from November, 1777, to August, 1783, and Here First Reprinted, as her PhD thesis. Prof. Bailey was active in Stanford dramatics and became involved as both an actress and director in the Shakespeare Festival at Ashland, Oregon, founded by another former student, Angus Bowmer. Her collection of rare volumes on Shakespeare’s life and times, which she used at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, grew to 200 volumes and was eventually donated to the Southern Oregon University. In 1957 she published Ashland Studies in Shakespeare. She wrote three additional books for children, all illustrated by Alice Bolam Preston: Seven Peas in the Pod (1920), The Little Man with One Shoe (1921) and Whistle for Good Fortune (1940).

In 1951, she wrote the introduction for Boswell's Column, Being his Seventy Contributions to The London Magazine under the pseudonym The Hypochondriack from 1777 to 1783 here First Printed in Book Form in England.
She corresponded with John P. Marquand, Clarence Darrow, Gertrude Stein, Robinson Jeffers, Irvin S. Cobb, Harold Bell Wright, Helen Keller, and Gregory Peck, among many others. She was lauded as "one of Stanford’s most celebrated teachers in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s."