Roberta White

Roberta Horton White died Saturday, August 17, at her home in Danville, Kentucky, after a long battle with cancer.  She was born Roberta Jean Horton on December 18, 1938, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to Arlos Charles Horton and Dorothy Moore Horton.  An only child, Roberta grew up in Michigan, where she read voraciously, played the piano, and even worked as a summer camp counselor.  She graduated from Albion College in 1960, and that same year she received a master’s degree in English from the University of Chicago, a feat she accomplished by attending summer school at Chicago. In 1961, while starting her Ph.D., she met Richard Bruce White on a blind date, and they married within the year. Together, they moved to Palo Alto, where they both worked on their doctorate degrees at Stanford, his in Philosophy and hers in English.  They completed their degrees in 1971.

Before they finished, they took jobs at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky.  They jumped at the chance to work at the same institution and moved to Danville in 1967.  Roberta’s scholarly work was primarily on twentieth-century novels by women.  Her range of learning was such, however, that she taught a large group of courses, from introductions to poetry to surveys to seminars on Joyce and Woolf, and even a seminar on John Milton.  While she was considered a brilliant teacher from the start, she became legendary as time went on, and she won the first Kirk Award for Teaching Excellence in 1996.  When Centre introduced honorary named professorships, she became the Luellen Professor of English. She also did a great deal of administrative work; she was the chair of the Humanities Division, and she played a major role in establishing the very competitive and prestigious John C. Young senior honors projects.

While Bruce retired in 1999, Roberta continued until 2002.  Her book, A Studio of One’s Own: Fictional Women Painters and the Art of Fiction appeared in 2005.  In her retirement, Roberta indulged her love of reading and writing and published an essay, “Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf: The Novelist’s Art” in Virginia Woolf and 20^th Century Women Writers, edited by a former student, Kathryn Stelmach Artuso (2014).  She spent time with her many good friends (a number of whom had been either students or colleagues), cooking elegant dinners paired with fine wines.  When Bruce died in 2011, Roberta took up a new hobby to deal with her grief over a beloved spouse, and she started dry-point etching.  Even after she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, she remained cheerful, spending her time between books, puzzles, and friends.  Up to the last, she was stoic and had wonderful care, both from Hospice and from her niece, a registered nurse. Her nephew, Stephen Taylor White, preceded her in death. She is survived by niece Kimberly J. White, great-nephew Stephen Trevor White, his wife, Hannah, and their daughters, Willow Harper and Micah Grace.

A memorial service will take place in the Evans-Lively room of Centre’s Carnegie Library at 3 pm on September 7th. Stith Funeral Home in Danville is handling arrangements.  

In lieu of flowers, expressions of sympathy may take the form of donations to Centre College.