Case 4
With Helen

Frye met Helen Kemp, a fellow Vic student and a Toronto native, at Music Club rehearsals at Victoria College. While he later quipped that it was not love at first sight, “it was a ‘very effortless operation’”. Frye and Kemp were apart at various times during their early relationship. Letters travelled between London and Toronto, when Helen left for the United Kingdom to study art at the Courtauld Institute in 1934-35 and between Toronto and Oxford when Frye attended Oxford in 1936-1937. Frye returned to Oxford to complete his degree in 1938. Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp married at Victoria College in August 1937.