Garnett Sedgewick's student and successor as head of the UBC English Department, Roy Daniells, once described his mentor as "a small man with a large head, not deformed, but oddly shaped. He hailed from the Maritimes. He was a homosexual and like many bachelors with that tendency... he had a mother who lived to be about a hundred... He taught Chaucer as nobody in U.B.C. before or after could. He lived each part. His magnificent, resonant voice impersonated each of the Pilgrims." Sedgewick had learned his passion for Shakespeare and Chaucer from his mentor at Harvard, George Lyman Kittredge. Old fashioned but not a prude, he was a civil libertarian who ironically refused to teach women in introductory English courses and who segregated first year classes by gender up to 1941. Although he published a regular column in the Vancouver Sun, he published relatively little as an academic. First published in 1935, his work Of Irony: Especially in Drama (Ronsdale 2001) first appeared as part of the Alexander Lectures series at the University of Toronto. It examines the role that irony has played in tragedy from the ancient Greeks to the 20th century. [See biographical sketch below for more info.]