Elizabeth Fallaize was an international authority on the work of Simone de Beauvoir as well as a leading figure in French studies, a much loved teacher and mentor, and from 2005 to 2008 a highly effective Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education at the University of Oxford.

Her life had many dimensions beyond the academic. She had a gift for love and friendship and an enthusiastic joie de vivre that encompassed travel, food, fiction and fashion. She was also a generous and committed feminist.

Fallaize graduated from the University of Exeter with a first-class degree in French, and remained there for her postgraduate studies. She began her career with a short spell in what was then a large, progressive department of languages at Wolverhampton Polytechnic, moved on to the French department at the University of Birmingham, and then in 1989 was appointed the first woman Official Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford. With no previous experience of Oxbridge, and as a woman (moreover, a woman who specialised in the canonically dubious field of women’s writing) in a very male world, Fallaize needed all her perspicacity, determination and sense of humour to adapt and make her mark at Oxford.

She did this so well that she was soon being asked to stand for the demanding post of Junior Proctor, then to become Chair of the Modern Languages Faculty Board, and finally in 2005 to become a Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the whole university. Her combination of sure judgment, attentiveness to others, and well-developed diplomatic skills meant that her performance of all of these roles met with a rare unanimity of approval. She developed a great sense of pleasure and pride in belonging both to St John’s and to Oxford.

As Pro-Vice-Chancellor she was particularly concerned with the advancement of graduate studies and made provision in her will to help to found a graduate studentship in her name. She also managed to pursue a research career that helped to revise the canon of French literature and to alter the terms of its analysis. Among her most important books are The Novels of Simone de Beauvoir (1988), French Women’s Writing: Recent Fiction (1993), Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader (1998), French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years, co-written with Colin Davis in 2000, and The Oxford Book of French Short Stories, which she edited in 2002. She was awarded a professorship in French literature in 2002, and, despite the onset of motor neuron disease, managed to deliver several keynote papers at international conferences celebrating De Beauvoir’s 2008 centenary. She was honoured by the French Government for services to French culture, being appointed an Officier dans l’ordre des palmes académiques in 2002, and promoted to Commandeur in 2009.

Fallaize’s individual achievements as a scholar went hand in hand with collaborative work. She was co-editor of French Studies, the leading international journal in the field, from 1996 to 2004, and edited the series Oxford Studies in Modern European Literature, Film and Culture for the Oxford University Press. She was a founder member of Women in French, established in 1988 as an informal support network to counter the minority status of women both in university departments and on the university syllabus. She organised the first research sub-group of “WIF” on women’s writing, and contributed to many of the seminars, conferences and collective publications that followed. Her qualities as a supervisor were warmly appreciated by her many successful postgraduate students, and these same virtues made her an excellent colleague, mentor and role model, for she combined firm, discriminating judgment with patience, warmth and an exceptional ability to recognise and foster the best in other people’s thinking.

Fallaize was at the height of her powers as a scholar and an academic leader, and at an especially happy point in her life, when the illness struck out of the blue in 2007. It is hard to see how anyone could have coped more gracefully with the horror of the diagnosis, or with the relentless onset of the disease. With the loving support of Alan Grafen, her companion and husband for the past 13 years, she remained utterly herself to the very end. Elegant, warm, interested in everything, she continued a dialogue with others through the use of a whiteboard, and through her husband’s intuitive interpretations, up to her final day. A portrait of her was commissioned by St John’s and now hangs in the College Hall.

Fallaize is survived by her husband Alan, by her daughter and son from her first marriage to Michael Driscoll, and by Alan Grafen’s two daughters.

Professor Elizabeth Fallaize, scholar in French studies and Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education at the University of Oxford, 2005-08, was born on June 3, 1950. She died of motor neuron disease on December 6, 2009, aged 59