xviii INTRODUCTION
This book is also an amplification—even a refutation—of
the few, brief biographical sketches of Kober that have appeared
in published accounts of the decipherment over the years. Be-
cause the writers had none of her personal correspondence on
which to draw, they were obliged to conjure Kober whole from
her few, rigorous published articles. As a result, these sketches
inevitably leave the reader with the impression of a stern, hu-
morless woman who had little passion for anything outside the
serious enterprise of deciphering Linear B.
“In the words of Ventris written after the decipherment,
her approach was ‘prim but necessary,’ ” Andrew Robinson has
written in
Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeci-
phered Scripts,
published in 2002. “To go further would re-
quire a mind like his that combined her perseverance, logic and
method, with a willingness to take intellectual risks.”
Kober was indeed cautious and methodical, but she
was also, as her hundreds of letters amply attest, funny, self-
deprecating, charming, and intensely concerned about practi-
cally everything. She moved through her short life with a quiet,
burning ardor—for teaching, for learning, for the just treat-
ment of her fellow human beings—that belied her prim exterior
and seemed born of what she evocatively called “a feeling for
the fitness of things.” Her correspondence also makes clear that
she did allow herself to entertain, privately, some intellectually
risky approaches to the riddle of Linear B. Some of these, ar-
rived at independently by Ventris after Kober’s death, would
bring about its solution.
The scholarly field on which Kober did battle in the 1930s
and ’40s was very much a man’s world, and it is understand-
able, if now unpalatable, that her male contemporaries so often
