In the preface to her final book, Shakespeare’s Tragic Skepticism (Yale, 2002), Millicent Bell stated her ambitious aim: “I have tried to mark out a pathway across a trampled field.…But in the case of Shakespeare, there is always something true and important that seems not to have been said before.”

In her scholarly life, Bell, a College of Arts & Sciences professor emerita of English, demonstrated this same fusion of intellectual boldness, passion, and generosity—traits she inspired her students to discover in themselves.

Bell died on August 6, 2015. She was 95.

At age 15, Bell enrolled at New York University and went on to earn an MA and a PhD at Brown University. She joined the English department at BU in 1963 and taught English and American literature at CAS and the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences until she retired in 1993. Awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Fulbright Travel Grant to France, she was also a visiting professor at universities in France and Italy.

Among scores of journal articles, Bell penned classic essays on Melville’s Moby-Dick and on the “Fallacy of the Fall” in Milton’s Paradise Lost. She wrote several critically acclaimed books on Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edith Wharton, and Henry James, as well as Marquand: An American Life (Little, Brown, 1979), which was nominated for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her elegant and penetrating literary criticism also appeared frequently in the New York Review of Books.

Bell’s teaching interests were equally boundless, ranging from the medieval epic and romance to the modern novel. She was my undergraduate and graduate advisor at Boston University in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and her classes sparkled with excitement. Whether presenting an academic paper, teaching, or conversing, she was effervescent—an endearing quality that kindled classroom discussions and a devoted following.

And Bell loved her students. She and her husband, renowned MIT biologist Gene Bell, hosted memorable gatherings for her classes, first at their handsome brownstone off Beacon Street (which one English professor described as “something out of a Henry James novel”), and later at their Commonwealth Avenue home near the Charles River Campus.

Devoted to the life of the mind and imagination, Bell did not consider herself a social activist, but her empathy and sense of justice were keen. On the morning after the killings of four students at Kent State on May 4, 1970, when BU canceled final exams and hordes of students roamed around campus in grief and rage, several gathered around Bell on Bay State Road. She spoke quietly through tears about having seen one of the victims, Allison Krause, on TV putting flowers in the barrel of the gun of an Ohio National Guardsman.

After the death of her husband of seven decades, she established the Millicent and Eugene Bell Foundation to support public television and endow fellowships and projects dedicated to health, education, the sciences, and social justice.

Bell’s intellectual and social energy never flagged. When in 2002 I was president of the Emerson Society and she was president of the Hawthorne Society, my casual mention of links between American writers and British culture prompted her typically animated response that we should plan a joint American author conference in London. Although others had a more significant role in working out the logistics, Bell’s quick grasp of the matter materialized as Transatlanticism in American Literature, the pioneering joint international conference of the Emerson, Hawthorne, and Poe societies at the University of Oxford in 2006, and in turn, Conversazioni in Italia at Florence in 2012. She exemplified Emerson’s adage, “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one [woman].”

When my wife, Sandy, and I stopped by Bell’s Commonwealth Avenue home some months ago to drive her to lunch, she insisted on walking. We couldn’t keep up with her as she dodged and wove her way through Boston traffic to Legal Sea Foods at the Prudential Center. It’s that indefatigable, contagious zest for everything she undertook that I still see and feel when I think of Millicent Bell.

Wesley T. Mott is a professor of English at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.