Gill Mirrlees was the first wife of Professor Sir James (Jim) Mirrlees, who was the 1996 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics. They married in 1961 at Trinity College Cambridge, and had two daughters, Catriona and Fiona. In 1968 the family moved to Oxford, where Jim took up a professorship at Nuffield College.

Much of Gill’s life was devoted to supporting Jim in his academic career, a role she carried with quiet strength and perseverance. Gill provided unwavering practical assistance throughout his time at Oxford University. As importantly, she was a sounding board for the development of his ideas on the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information and optimal tax theory. It was Gill’s support that enabled him to make these important contributions to economic theory, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Gill’s early passion was for the natural world. As a teenager she was fascinated by flora, choosing to train as a teacher specialising in secondary science at Homerton College in Cambridge, where she met Jim through the Christian Union. Though her teaching career was brief, ending when she married Jim, her love of botany endured. She immersed herself in the history of plants and in particular the stories of the early plant hunters, cultivating a lifelong curiosity for nature and appreciation for travel. She accompanied Jim on almost all his travels, relocating the family for regular international sabbaticals and deftly crafting holidays out of conference attendances.

Even when faced with illness, Gill remained committed to her intellectual pursuits. She worked diligently on a paper about the North American tree Sassifras Albidum for presentation at the Durham Thomas Harriot Seminar, supported by Catriona and her husband Jonathan. Although she died of breast cancer a few weeks prior to the conference, Jonathan delivered the paper on her behalf. The work reproduced here was first published as Occasional Paper No.12 in the Thomas Harriot Seminar series.

Though family life was not without challenges, Gill’s presence was a source of warmth and stability. Gill and Jim had a mutual love of good food, good wine, travel, architecture, contemporary art, classical music, opera and long walks in the Scottish hills. Gill balanced her responsibilities with grace, and her family remember her as a wonderful, underappreciated woman whose strength and kindness left a lasting impression on those lucky enough to know her. Her story is one of perseverance, intellectual curiosity, and quiet courage. Gill’s legacy is in how she enabled Jim’s contribution, and also in the example she set: a life lived with dignity, resilience, and an enduring love of learning. She is remembered with deep affection and gratitude.