Her last years were clouded by Christopher's progressive illness.She nursed him heroically, but managed to organise time for her own work.īefore her brief, final illness, she was at her usual seat in the Bodleian library, at her usual times in the week. Her own gardening, though enthusiastic, was somewhat impeded by the antics of her cat, Tabitha. She ranged over history, politics, literature, theatre and gardening. She was a good friend and a vivacious conversationalist. Despite her age, it would be true to say she died prematurely. Her articles would make a good book.Īt an age when many academics are thinking of retiring, Bridget was only getting going. In Women's History: A Study In Change, Continuity Or Standing Still?, which appeared in the Women's History Review in 1993, she debated the status of women with Judith Bennett. In 19, she had a go at the demographers in two articles in History Workshop Journal. In Servants: English Domestics In Eighteenth-Century England (1996) and Women Alone: Spinsters In England 1660-1850 (2002), she dealt with groups of women it is difficult to research,with great perspicacity.īridget also wrote some important articles, the first being A Refuge From Men: The Idea Of A Protestant Nunnery, which appeared in Past And Present in 1987. She now had more time for original work and, in 1992, revisited Catherine Macaulay in The Republican Virago: The Life And Times Of Catherine Macaulay, Historian. In 1984, she published Eighteenth-Century Women: An Anthology, and, in 1986, an edition of Mary Astell's writings. In 1972, Bridget returned to adult education, and worked with increasing responsibility for the Open University until her retirement in 1985. Writing in 1978, at the end of these golden Balliol years, Maurice Keen described the Hills' "special combination of dependence and independence". Christopher became master of Balliol in 1965, and, in 1967, the Hills wrote Catherine Macaulay And The 17th Century, a joint article on the 18th-century republican historian, published in the Welsh History Review.īridget left St Hilda's in 1968, devoting herself to her son and daughter, and to the job of being a fulltime master's wife. In 1960, Bridget became treasurer of St Hilda 's College, Oxford, and, in 1961,was made a fellow. Bridget immediately decided to have another child their son Andrew was born in 1958, and their daughter Dinah in 1960. Personal tragedy, however, struck them the following year when their 11-month-old daughter, Kate, was killed in a car crash.
After an amicable divorce, in 1956 she married Christopher Hill, then a Balliol don, and began a lifelong partnership of mutual devotion.ĭisillusion with the Communist party had troubled the Hills even before the Hungarian uprising, but the party had meant much to them, and they did not leave until after 1956. In the early 1950s,she married Steve Mason, a fellow communist, and worked in Oxford as an extramural tutor. In 1947-48,she was involved in the delegacy's international trade union school, and, in 1949,was in Prague on a scholarship. She was then recruited by Thomas Hodgkins, director of the Oxford delegacy of extramural studies, as a staff tutor in Staffordshire. Like many idealists, she joined the Communist party during the war, one did.
Bridget was educated at Godolphin and Latimer school in Hammersmith, west London, and read economic history at the London School of Economics, which was evacuated to Cambridge during the second world war.
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