My wife, Valerie Letcher, who has died after a heart valve operation aged 80, was an academic who wrote extensively on pioneering British female novelists and commentators in South Africa and Canada. In particular, she highlighted the contributions of Harriet Ward (writing from the Cape between 1842 and 1848) and the Munro sisters (Georgina and Isabella).
Valerie, who spent most of her career in South Africa, was a member of the Black Sash movement in the 1980s, whose members would line up outside political meetings or in the street, wearing their black sashes, after racist legislation had been passed by the nationalist government of the time.
