Dr. Jean Olivia Love

Dr. Jean Olivia Love CORNWALL, Pa. - Dr. Jean Olivia Love, 95, retired professor of psychology at Lebanon Valley College and author of scholarly books on Virginia Woolf, died Saturday, Dec. 26, 2015, in Cornwall, Pa.

Dr. Love retired in 1985 after more than 30 years on the LVC faculty, in Annville, Pa., including a long tenure as chairman of the department (1954-1970). Popular with both students and faculty, she was a favorite confidant for members of both groups and was remembered for her teaching, her commitment to opening the faculty to minorities and her defense of academic freedom.

Jean Olivia Love was born Feb, 27, 1920, in York County, the second daughter of Julia Foster Love and Walter Brown Love, who farmed cotton and other crops. Educated in York County public schools at Bethany, Clover and York, she went on to study literature at Erskine College.

With two brothers in the U.S. Navy as role models, she too joined the Navy and served during World War II. After the War and several jobs as a clerk or secretary in Washington, D.C., she returned to South Carolina to take a master's degree in psychology at Winthrop in 1949. She went from there to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill for a doctorate in 1953, and began teaching at LVC in 1954.

She pursued post-doctoral study at the Institute of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University in England, and at the Heinz Werner Institute of Developmental Psychology at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.

She was a serious amateur painter, working in water color, oils and mixed media. She had several one-person shows in the Lebanon area, and exhibited also in local, state and regional juried exhibits.

Although she loved the life of teacher and scholar, she wanted also to signify as a writer and was proudest of two scholarly studies she wrote about the English writer Virginia Woolf and how he madness could be traced in her novels. "Worlds in Consciousness: Mythopoetic Thought in the Novels of Virginia Wooolf" and "Virginia Woolf. Sources of Madness and Art" both had the scholarly distinction of being published by the University of California Press.

She was predeceased by her husband, Albert W. (Rudy) Blecker Sr.; by a sister, Mary Elizabeth Love Wells of McConnels, and by two brothers, Walter Brown Love Jr. of McConnells and James Lindsay Love of Oakridge. Her survivors include a number of nieces and nephews and several goddaughters. A graveside service will be held at 10 a.m. Friday, Jan. 8, in the Olivet Presbyterian Church cemetery in Mc-Connells.

Memorial gifts may be made to Compassionate Care Hospice in Lebanon, Pa.

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