In 1988, the great Canadian philosopher George Grant died. His 1965 masterpiece, Lament for a Nation, is generally considered, even 45 years after its publication, striking, fresh, brilliant and original, one of the finest books published about Canadian politics, even one of the finest books published about politics by a Canadian. Grant had seven honorary degrees and was a member of the Royal Society. His death was an item on the national news, and newspapers across the country noted his passing.

I wrote his biography, which was published in 1993. In 2008, I published a biography of his grandfather, Sir George Parkin. Parkin too was a fellow of the Royal Society, a brilliant journalist and educator. The pinnacle of his career was his service as founding secretary of the Rhodes scholarships, an extraordinary achievement of an exceptional man.

While I was writing Parkin’s biography I discovered that his success had depended, to a very great extent, on his wife. Time after time he left her to look after their children and sort out domestic matters while he travelled to make speeches or attend meetings. At one of the pivotal moments of his career he left Annie behind in New Brunswick when she was in the last stages of pregnancy to give a major and career-changing speech in Montreal. He was in England, and Annie was alone in Fredericton, when one of their children died.

This past November Sheila Grant, George Grant’s widow, passed away at the age of 89. Sheila Grant (née Allen) was not the high school educated woman that Annie Parkin was. Born in England in 1920, she had rigorous convent school training, which was strong in Greek and Latin. Formidably intelligent, she chose a course unusual for a young woman in the 1930s. She enrolled at Oxford to study English. Sheila was a pacifist. When the war broke out, she left Oxford, spent 1939-43 working as a nursing auxiliary in the Red Cross at a London hospital and 1943-45 in a military hospital in Oxford. She returned to Oxford after the war where she attended lecturers by such luminaries as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. It was also there that she met, and fell in love with George. When Grant was offered a job at Dalhousie, she completed her degree, married him, and became his wife, friend, intellectual companion and research assistant.

I knew her well over the last 25 years of her life. Her mind was razor-sharp, her learning immense, her culture broad. I edited The George Grant Reader with her and her scholarship was meticulous. When I was doing the research for my biography of her husband I came to the conclusion that she had written at least five articles that had appeared, for various reasons (none improper), over his name. One of the best of these pieces was an article on Dostoevsky. She told me that George had said: “‘You write the article, I’ll look after the children.’ Of course, I wrote the article and he didn’t look after the children,” she observed with a twinkle in her eye. When a newspaper praised Grant’s elegantly brief sentences, she wrote to me: “It is nice to hear George’s sentences described as elegantly brief. I take some credit for the brief. G. really liked them to be half a page long.”

She improved virtually everything Grant published, and he discussed philosophy with her as an equal. She spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours with the editors of Grant’s collected works when she was in her late 70s and 80s.

There have been many women like Annie Parkin who suffered neglect so that their husbands could have successful careers. They deserve our respect and admiration. Sheila Grant will probably not be remembered except by those who knew her. She was the wife of a famous husband, the mother of six children. She never had a career; she never held public office or official positions. She was content to help her husband. When I asked her why she hadn’t told me about the articles she had written or how much help she had given her husband, she wrote: “You surely understand that I wasn’t going to come forward unasked, as if I were anxious to grasp a crumb of the pie. Whenever he asked me to do something, I did it.”

Self-effacement is not a route to fame. How many women are there like Sheila Grant whose outstanding accomplishments we will never know?