Julia Briggs brought a diligent, pioneering spirit to an academic life. She wrote a series of diverse, highly readable, ever-questioning books which illuminate the ghost story, the Jacobean social setting, E. Nesbit, Virginia Woolf’s fiction – and the Mayflower. All these display a style redolent of the astute and easy manner which gained her that rare thing, her students’ esteem.

Julia Ruth Ballam was born in 1943, shortly after her mother, Gertrude, a designer who had left school at 15, had heard of her younger brother’s death in India – to where her husband, Harry Ballam, was shortly posted for RAF service.

Brought up in Highgate, North London, Julia Ballam had that burden of expectation common among war babies. Able to read by three, she studied at South Hampstead High School but more influential was her father, a highly romantic man who, with hopes of writing, had produced two anthologies but worked in advertising until his early death in 1961. The house was full of books, and family walks invariably paused by the Rossettis’ grave.

Always deeply self-critical, she worked hard and wanted to study English at Oxford. The school thought her not good enough; her widowed, impoverished mother paid for a cramming school, from which she applied to Oxford and Cambridge: no sooner had Girton offered a scholarship than St Hilda’s did so too – and, shamelessly, South Hampstead added her to its honours board.

After becoming pregnant in 1964 she was allowed to continue studying, but was denied the rest of her scholarship and was obliged to marry the father, Peter Gold; he duly left for South America while telling their friend, Robin Briggs, to keep an eye on her, an instruction which this 17th-century historian took further: they were married in 1969, her son acquiring the surname he in due course shared with two more boys.

Amid this turbulence, she completed a BLitt on the 19th-century ghost story and taught in various establishments before winning a fellowship at Hertford College in 1978. By then her thesis had become Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (1977) which, dedicated to her father’s memory, chronicled the ghost story, with welcome emphasis upon J. S. Le Fanu. In 1983 came The Stage-Play World, a brisk, popular account of the background to diverse writers’ work in Elizabethan and Jacobean times when “as much as half the population lived at subsistence level, while all were liable to sudden pain, incurable sickness and early death”.

Within four years, after securing previously unknown papers from Doris Langley Moore and undertaking many other journeys, she had produced A Woman of Passion, a hefty biography of E. Nesbit, the author of The Railway Children. She also served on education committees, which eventually brought her the appointment to OBE.

Briggs had a decorously rebellious spirit, even modest: whenever asked about her line of work, she said that she was a teacher. She was always concerned for her students, always encouraging (and much pleased, for example, by Andrea Ashworth’s success with Once in a House on Fire). Although among those who prevented Mrs Thatcher’s honorary doctorate, she was equally vexed by the Blair Government’s educational shortfalls.

Her work on Virginia Woolf was interrupted in 1999 by breast cancer which she endured resiliently; her book, published in 2005, was completed during a joyful Sorbonne sabbatical, and dedicated to her sister Anthea, to whom she was close (they collaborated on Mayflower: The Voyage That Changed the World, 2003). Rooted in all the manuscripts, her account of Woolf brilliantly and engagingly returned the writer to her novels.

Never wanting to claim any one period and milk it endlessly, she produced four books which will find readers for a long while. She had many more ideas in mind. After wearying of Oxford in the mid1990s, she had sold her house to buy flats in Brighton and Bloomsbury, from which she travelled for work as Professor of English Literature at DeMontfort University.

There now seemed plenty of time, but when cancer returned as a brain tumour six months ago, she kept remarkably cheerful, finding peace in her allotment, the only crisis being a sudden inability to understand words. With typical resourcefulness, she taught herself to read again, and when she could no longer take in the edges of the pages, she enjoyed good children’s books, her mind sharp enough to plan her funeral. She always had style and grace.

She and Robin Briggs were divorced and she is survived by three sons, one of whom, Simon, is a cricket correspondent for The Daily Telegraph.

Professor Julia Briggs, OBE, literary scholar and writer, was born on December 30, 1943. She died of cancer on August 16, 2007, aged 63