Ruth Loyd Miller was born in Ida, Louisiana and graduated form LSU in 1942. She later attended the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. After reading law, she passed the Louisiana Bar Exam in 1957 and was a member of the Louisiana State Bar Association and the American Bar Association. In 1967 she was admitted to practice law before the United States Supreme Court. As an attorney, she was a tireless advocate for issues that supported women's rights.

She was the first woman to serve on the Louisiana Mineral Board; a delegate and first Vice-Chairman of the Louisiana Constitutional Convention of 1973; and in 1984 the first woman to be elected Chairman of the Board of Supervisors of the Louisiana State University System of which she was a member for 14 years from 1974-1988. In 1987, she earned a Masters of Arts degree in English literature from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She was a member of Mortar Board, Phi Kappa Phi, and the National Woman of the Year for the Delta Zeta Sorority. In 1995 she was admitted to the LSU Alumni Hall of Distinction.

Posterity will remember her for her trail-blazing achievements on the subject of the Shakespeare authorship question. She edited and published four books in support of the theory that the Shakespeare canon was written by Edward deVere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. For many years she presented annual lectures at the Huntington Library in California, and wrote numerous articles on the authorship subject. Her work has gained interest and acceptance the world over. She has been recognized by the influential New Yorker Magazine, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times for her achievements and contributions to this important historical debate.

Oxfordianism in Germany is of relatively recent inception. Along with Charlton Ogburn Jr, Ruth Loyd Miller and her husband Minos are held here in the highest esteem as belonging to a generation spurred more by the desire of serving the cause than by self-serving. Something of this spirit might have been lost in the course of more recent times. Probably, and hopefully, this spirit will be fully restored, re-membered. Remembering, as Shakespeare himself put it, is the toll the ferryman Charon has no right to, because his boat is too light for it, it remains this side of Styx and Lethe, of darkness and oblivion.

And so death is sometimes the last and only resort of revival. What merely lives on is by the living often perceived as gone, forgotten, what is gone by them remembered and returned to life. Alive we are but living, only death spends the proper light to a full life. A full life is never contained in itself, it is what lives on by ending. And in this end never ends, but continues as witness.

Ruth Loyd Miller's life is such a witness. She has rendered herself the greatest service by not having been self-serving.

-- Robert Detobel

Robert Detobel of Frankfurt, Germany is a translator, publicist and co-editor of the Neues Shakes-speare Journal, a European Oxfordian publication. Before getting involved in the authorship debate in 1982, he published on Third World issues and translated works from French sociologist Alain Touraine. Recently, he has published a book and many articles on the authorship question and addressed numerous Oxfordian conventions. 

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his highth be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

SONNET 116

~ The 17th Earl of Oxford

Ruth Loyd

M. D. Miller

The family of Ruth Loyd Miller wishes to express heart-felt appreciation to the friends the world over who share our loss. Whether one agrees with our Mom about who wrote Shakespeare, it is universally agreed that she was a remarkable woman. To be sure, her family applauded her efforts to bring the true author of the Shakespeare canon to the attention of the world. It has been brought to our attention once or twice that this is a minority opinion.

Throughout the years our Mom responded to callers with more than just boundless enthusiasm, she sent reams of carefully prepared materials brimming over with information and documentation, of course free of charge  -- to them . But as Edward deVere, the 17th Earl of Oxford divested himself of his properties presumably to finance his literary work, it is only fair that posterity should provide him with a pro bono attorney to plead his case.

In an interview with James Lardner for the April, 1988 issue of The New Yorker, she is quoted:

"Every letter I seal, every stamp I put on a letter to go out to somebody, every book I mail, I give it a little pat and I say a little prayer: 'May the person that receives this be the instrument of bringing about the Great Change,' because you never know who will be the instrument."

I hope that sometime in her busy life she took time to look in the mirror.

Her loving daughter,

Bonner