Overview
The English Building faces the main quad of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, built in 1905 as the Woman's Building — housing women's programmes and, in its early configuration, residential and social space for the university's women — before decades of remodelling settled the English department into its classrooms and offices; the campus's senior legend comes from those dormitory-era years: telling of a student who died by her own sorrow in the building — versions vary, and no death there is documented, which the record states plainly and gently — leaving the presence generations of students and staff have since described: footsteps in empty corridors, cold crossing certain rooms, doors, lights, and a female figure at the windows and on the stairs, retold each Halloween in campus press for the better part of a century. The building is a working academic hall, visited within campus norms. Present the English Building as quad heritage first — the Woman's Building's real history of women's education — with its legend hedged, its invented sorrow held softly.