- Date Of Birth: December 4, 1939
- Date Of Death: April 23, 2022
- State: Connecticut
Raymond Albin Anselment, 82, of Storrs, CT walked the way of nature on April 23, 2022. The second of Angella, née Lenich, and Lawrence Anselment’s four children, he was born in Ely Minnesota on December 4, 1939. His father wanted their children to have opportunities for education he did not have. And they did. Ray received a PhD in English literature from the University of Rochester. In graduate school he met Carol Kowal. After they were married he joined the faculty at the University of Rochester.
Throughout forty-three years in the English Department at the University of Connecticut, teaching was a significant source of fulfillment. Research and writing reflected his interest in literary history. A fellow of the Royal Historical Society, among his publications are books on Early Modern religious prose satire, Loyalists’ poetic responses to the English Civil War, and seventeenth-century literature and medicine. In addition to numerous essays on a range of authors and topics, he transcribed manuscripts of three late seventeenth-century women in scholarly editions of their writing.
Though he did not return to Minnesota as often as he had wished, he welcomed the chance to appreciate the beauty of the state’s northern wilderness, lakes, and Boundary Waters. More often he returned to England. With Carol and their daughter, Jessica, he had memorable sabbatical years in Oxford and in Cambridge. For over twenty years he and his wife also lived for a month almost every year in London, where he took the Northern Line from Hampstead to the British Library.
He leaves Carol, his companion and support during 58 years of marriage; their daughter Jessica Wollmar, her husband Christer, and their children Annie and Audrey, whom he taught to fish. He also leaves his sisters Lois Anselment, Florence Anderson and her husband Donn, and Lynese Nowak and her husband John; as well as sisters-in law Bonnie Sullivan and Joan Soltys and eight nieces and nephews.
