Many of her students have described her as the most brilliant mind and greatest teacher they have ever encountered in any field at any institution. She taught briefly at Barnard College, and in South Korea at Ewha Women’s University, but primarily lavished her great literary and pedagogical gifts on the girls of the Brearley School in New York City, where she taught for 40 years, and where she was the guiding star of an English department that rivaled any in the country. Ruth opened the minds of thousands of Brearley girls to the abiding value of literature. She taught everything from Malory to Jane Austen to Samuel Beckett to Langston Hughes, but Shakespeare was her first love, literally. At the age of 12, she saw a traveling production of Hamlet in Franklin, Tennessee, and suddenly she “was in love” — simultaneously with the red headed actor playing the lead, with Hamlet and with Shakespeare. It was to Ruth’s Shakespeare elective that the students of Brearley flocked every year, and it was to Shakespeare that she primarily devoted her luminous attention after retiring from the Brearley School in 2000.