Judy Stoffman in the Globe and Mail provides a detailed obituary of Maria Tippett, and places her (accurately I think) as a pioneer of academic cultural history of Canada.
She led a charmed life, living part of the year in Cambridge, England, where she was a senior research fellow at Churchill College, married to the Cambridge historian Peter Clarke, the master of Trinity Hall.
During the summer months, they would return to British Columbia – at first to Bowen Island then later to South Pender, one of B.C.’s idyllic Gulf Islands. There she and her husband began their day at 7:30 a.m. at their writing desks, then discussed what they had written in the afternoon.