My university tutor, supervisor and friend, Gerald Doherty, who has died aged 84, was a charismatic teacher and respected scholar of DH Lawrence and James Joyce.
Gerald was born in Galway and brought up in the town of Roscommon. His father, Thomas Doherty, was the town dentist, and his mother, Freda, a teacher. Gerald attended the local Christian Brothers' school and in 1946 went to University College Dublin to study medicine. After three years, and for reasons concerning his health, he switched to English. After graduating, he spent three years teaching English in Paris then moved to London, taking an MPhil at King's College and a PhD at University College. It was during his years in London that he met and married his wife, Pamela.
He was lecturer in English at UCL from 1969 to 1972, but then moved to Finland to take up a senior lectureship at the University of Turku, teaching English literature and literary theory.
Gerald was much loved by his students and had an exceptionally attentive eye for the nuances of literary language. His style was full of insight and boyish glee. He was one of the first critics to advance a post-structuralist reading of DH Lawrence and published numerous works on Lawrence in leading academic journals.
His essays were frequently anthologised and he wrote two books on Lawrence, Theorising Lawrence (1999) and Oriental Lawrence (2001). Gerald also published many incisive essays on James Joyce in the James Joyce Quarterly, as well as two books, Dubliner's Dozen: The Games Narrators Play (2004) and Pathologies of Desire (2008).
For almost five decades Gerald practised meditation each day. He also had a scholarly interest in Buddhism and received a number of invitations to lecture on Eastern philosophy in Japan.
He retired from his academic post in 1995, but kept up his research and writing until the final weeks of his life. His last article, finished in December 2013, was on Joyce.
He was honoured by the president of Finland in 1990, and in 2010 the English department at Turku university held an international symposium celebrating his work.
Following Pamela's death in 2000 Gerald spent the rest of his life in their house on the remote island of Rymättylä, amid the untouched Finnish forests and the sea.