Margaret Hubbard (16 June 1924 – 28 April 2011) was an Australian-born British classical scholar specialising in philology.
Hubbard excelled during her school career at Adelaide High School, which she attended on receipt of a Government bursary won in 1938.[1] Upon graduating from high school she won the Tennyson medal for the top place in the leaving examinations, and Annie Montgomerie Martin prize for coming top in modern history.[1] She then studied for an undergraduate degree at the University of Adelaide, reading Latin, English and Greek there,.[2] She was then awarded a scholarship to attend Somerville College, Oxford in 1948 to study Classics, the first time this scholarship had been awarded to an overseas applicant without an interview.[3] Hubbard graduated in 1953 with a First Class Degree.[4]: 247 In 1949 she won the Dorothy McCalman Scholarship, bequeathed by Winifred Holtby, and in 1950 was awarded the Hertford Scholarship and Craven Scholarship.[4]: 224 She was the first woman to win the Hertford Scholarship.[4]: 224
She worked for a brief period at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in Munich,[2] before becoming Mary Somerville Research Fellow at Somerville College from 1955 to 1957.[4]: 224 In 1957 she moved to St Anne's College as a tutor, a post she held for the remainder of her career.[4]: 224 The following year, she won the Ireland Scholarship, which has been described as "the most distinguished Classical award open to members of [Oxford] University."[4]: 224 She followed this with two further awards, the Craven Fellowship and the Passmore Edwards Scholarship.[4]: 224 From 1957 to 1986, she was a tutor and Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford,[5] making her one of St Anne's College's 15 founding fellows.[6] The noted novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch was also among this group, and dedicated her 1962 novel An Unofficial Rose to Hubbard.[7][8] It was the potential public scandal of an affair between Murdoch and Hubbard which caused Murdoch to resign her own fellowship at St Annes in 1962.[9][10] Hubbard served as University Assessor in 1964–5.[11]
She spent her retirement travelling, cooking, reading, and doing jigsaws with her "adored companion" and partner Gwynneth Matthews, who had been a tutor in Ancient Philosophy at St Anne's,[8][12] and with whom she had lived since at least the 1960s.[13]: 103 In 2007 she was elected to an honorary fellowship at St Anne's, and the following year a one-day conference was held to commemorate Hubbard's work.[8] In her will she gave money to fund the college's Fellowship in Classical Languages and Literature, named after her father, A.E. Hubbard.[14] She died in 2011.[8] Hubbard has been described as "one of the most distinguished classical scholars of the modern age".[8]
Hubbard worked primarily on Latin literature. Her major works include a "monumentally authoritative" commentary on Horace in two volumes (1970 and 1978),[5] produced with Robin Nisbet, described as "models of lucidity and of learning."[8] She also wrote a study of Propertius (1974), who she declared to be the "author she loved best".[8] Her other work included articles on Virgil,[15] Horace,[16] and Propertius.[17] Eduard Fraenkel when asked to write about her suitability for the post as a tutor of Classics commented (quoted in her obituary), "When asked to say something about Margaret, I must face the risk of being charged with indulging in superlatives. She is really extraordinary."[8]