Alice Walker was the leading English textual critic of the 1950s and 1960s. Much of her scholarship was undertaken to prepare for the editing of William Shakespeare, particularly the Oxford Old-Spelling Shakespeare inaugurated by R. B. McKerrow, but in the event she produced only two editions of plays by Shakespeare. Nevertheless, she examined the most perplexing problems in Shakespearean editing and made signal contributions to the textual study of such plays as Hamlet, Othello, and Troilus and Cressida. She was early to recognize the contribution to textual transmission made by compositors when they transmitted texts from manuscripts or printed copy into type. Together with Fredson Bowers and his pupil Charlton Hinman, Alice Walker made compositorial analysis the distinctive feature of the "newer bibliography" of the second half of the twentieth century.

Walker was reticent about details of her personal life and, not being in later life concerned to...