Though academically brilliant, my mother, Catherine Peters, who has died aged 94, did not go to university until she was 46, when she moved to Oxford with her second husband, the psychiatrist Anthony Storr.
She achieved a top first in English literature shortly before her 50th birthday, subsequently becoming for many years a much-loved and respected teacher of English at Somerville College, as well as an acclaimed literary biographer of 19th-century authors. In 1987 she published Thackeray’s Universe, followed in 1993 by The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins. Her biography Charles Dickens appeared in 1998 and Byron in 2000.
