Dorothy’s Obituary Dorothy H. Jacobs, 90, of Narragansett, Emerita Professor of English, University of Rhode Island, a faculty member of the URI English Department from 1968 to 1998, passed away Sunday evening, February 10, 2019, at South County Hospital under the care of Hope Hospice. She died peacefully with her younger son, Matthew Jacobs, and her companion and caregiver, Joe Fargnoli, at her bedside. Professor Jacobs specialized in seventeenth-century English poetry and in modern drama.
She was also active in the university’s faculty union, AAUP. Her scholarship and research regularly took her to Oxford, England, and to the Bodleian Library’s Duke Humphrey’s Library, and in 1983, to the International Milton Symposium, at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where she presented her study, “Of Books and War: Milton and Fairfax at Cambridge”. An Andrew Marvell scholar, she was led to Thomas, III Lord Fairfax, by Marvell’s magnificent, English country house poem, “Upon Appleton House,” since Marvell had been tutor to the general’s daughter, Mary Fairfax, at Nun Appleton.
Professor Jacobs helped support the restoration of the memorial to Fairfax, Commander of the New Model Army in the English Civil Wars, at Bilbrough, Yorkshire. In the area of mediaeval English poetry, she did a study of the great fourteenth-century work, PIERS PLOWMAN. Professor Jacobs had a passion for and devotion to the theatre as well, which were reflected in her teaching and scholarship.
Several courses she developed on modern drama were especially successful with her students, “Wilde, Shaw, and Yeats,” “Beckett, Pinter, and Stoppard,” and “Masterpieces of Modern Drama,” the latter of which Tony Estrella, Artistic Director of the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre, has stated, “I cherish the memory of that course and [Professor Jacobs’] generous attentions to my undergraduate, passionate but fumbling attempts to grapple with the greats. [Her] wisdom and encouragement helped stay my course to a very fulfilling life in the theatre”. At the MLA’s Annual Convention in Chicago in 1985, her paper, “Working Worlds in David Mamet’s Dramas,” highlighted a focus at the convention on Chicago writers and introduced a new approach in the study of the Chicago playwright.
She published other studies of Mamet, including “Levene’s Daughter: Positioning the Female in GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS,” a feminist critique of the use and depiction of absent and near-absent female characters in Mamet’s works. Another of her articles with a feminist thrust was “The New Arcadia: Daytime Television Drama,” an interdisciplinary look at popular culture, media, mediaeval romance, and the contemporary prejudice of disparaging “the soaps” as the entertainment fare of housewives. In another article on the American author, Kate Chopin, Professor Jacobs drew parallels between the female protagonist in Chopin’s novel, THE AWAKENING, and Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler.
A long-time supporter of and subscriber to Trinity Repertory Theatre, in 1992 she produced a study of set designs that were the work of Trinity Theatre’s Resident Designer, Eugene Lee. She was also an accomplished poet, with numerous publications. She and her colleague, Professor Mary Cappello, from 1993 to .
1998, transformed the department’s co-curricular poetry readings into the URI Writers’ Collective, a forum for workshops, visiting artists, and student creative writing. One of her poems, published in AETHLON: THE JOURNAL OF SPORT LITERATURE, evokes the Olympic victory at Lillehammer of the speed skater Dan Jansen, when, skating his victory lap, he holds the American flag with one hand and with the other his infant daughter. She was born March 13, 1928, the child of Alfred and Elna (Nelson) Olson, in Hinsdale, Illinois, and raised in the village of La Grange nearby, a suburb of Chicago.
In 1943 her family moved to Three Rivers, Michigan. She graduated from Three Rivers High School in 1946, and, as a Regents’ Scholar, attended the University of Michigan, where she graduated with a B.A. degree in 1950. That summer she wedded her high school sweetheart, David C. Jacobs of Three Rivers, and the married couple moved to Detroit, where he went to medical school at Wayne State University and she taught English in the city’s public schools.
In 1953, when David completed his medical degree, they went to Pasadena, California, where he did his internship and residency at Huntington Memorial Hospital, and where she gave birth to their first child, John Nelson Jacobs, December 2, 1953. David went into the Army in 1955, and Dorothy gave birth to their second child, Matthew Clark Jacobs, August 30, 1955, at Ft. Carson, Colorado, where David, an Army captain, was stationed.
On September 24, 1956, he died when the army transport plane he was aboard crashed in the Colorado Rockies. With her two tiny boys she returned to Three Rivers, Michigan, and the next spring to Ann Arbor, where she raised her sons and at the University of Michigan got her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English. In 1968 she was appointed to the URI faculty, and she and the boys took up residency that fall in Narragansett, on Central Street, in the very house that remained her home for more than fifty years,- residing there until she took ill in late January.
Having grown up in a Swedish family, she had been a skier and ice-skater from childhood and taught her sons. Her mother and grandmother taught her sewing, knitting, and how to make clothes. She loved singing, reading, biking, tennis, yoga, and gardening.
Both her sons, who went to Moses Brown, played on the hockey team. She is survived by her sons, two grand-daughters, and a great-grand-daughter. Private services will be held in Narragansett and California.
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