YATES, FRANCES AMELIA was born on November 29, 1899, in Southsea, Hampshire, and died in Surbiton, Surrey, on September 29, 1981. By the time a brief illness ended a long life of intense and single-minded scholarly endeavor, her reputation had reached almost cult status.

Yates was the fourth and youngest child of James Alfred Yates and Hannah Eliza Malpas. Her father, having entered Portsmouth Naval Dockyard as an apprentice, had risen to chief constructor of the British navy. One of her elder sisters was a schoolteacher and novelist, the other an art-student-turned-missionary. On the death in action of her only brother in 1915, the ambitions of a close-knit family came to center on her. Hopes of following her brother to Oxford having been disappointed, partly because of interruptions to early formal schooling, she took a London first-class degree in French by correspondence, following it with a graduate thesis on...