Two for the price of one: Doris Livesey Reynolds (1899–1985)

Abstract

Doris Reynolds, known less commonly by her married name Doris Holmes, was an English geologist and petrologist. She is best known for her role in the Granite Controversy that started in the late 1930s and continued throughout the 1940s and 1950s, and particularly for her contribution to the concept of ‘granitization’ in the formation of granites. She was greatly influenced by Catherine Raisin, who introduced her to petrology at Bedford College for Women where Reynolds studied for her first degree. Throughout her career Reynolds worked on igneous intrusions and their associated metamorphism, with particular emphasis on the Newry Igneous Complex in Ireland. In her papers she detailed the sequences of chemical changes that led to granitization which she postulated occurred as a series of ‘fronts’. She argued that these fronts altered the sedimentary rocks through which they passed, eventually turning the sediments into granites or other igneous rocks, depending on the ions carried by the front. In 1939, she married Arthur Holmes; in 1949, she was among the first five women to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in 1960 she was awarded the Lyell Medal by the Geological Society of London for her research, her original mind and her refusal to be cowed by the Establishment.