Margaret Crum was born in 1921 and read for a BLitt at Somerville College, Oxford, during which time she also taught and began work on the indexing of English poetry in the manuscript collections of the Bodleian Library. From 1953 to 1981 she was on the staff of the Library as the Department of Western Manuscripts’ specialist in areas relating to literature and music. Besides cataloguing large numbers of manuscripts in both fields and other scholarly activities, she also published an edition of The poems of Henry King (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), for which she won the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 1966; a monumental First-line index of English poetry, 1500-1800 in manuscripts of the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); and the first two volumes of the Catalogue of the Mendelssohn papers in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1980, 1983). She died on 18 July 1986.