Mabel Steele, 62, Curator of Keats Collection, Dies

Miss Mabel A. E. Steele curator of the Keats Collection in Houghton Library since 1942, died Friday after a long illness. Miss Steele, a well-known authority on the Romantic Period in literature, was 62.

Miss Steele held a number of degrees in various fields. She received a B.A. at the University of Denver in 1925, an A.M. in English at Radcliffe in 1930, and a B.S. in Library Science at Simmons in 1936. Earlier this year, Denver awarded her honorary membership in the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Keats and Shelley were Miss Steele's particular interests, and her studies of them were widely recognized. For a dozen years prior to her death, she was one of the directors of the Keats-Shelley Association of America and chairman of the editorial board of the "Keats-Shelley Journal."

Miss Steele wrote a number of articles and notes on Keats for scholarly journals. She frequently lent time and assistance to other students of her specialized field.

There will be a funeral service today at Christ Church, 1 Garden Street in Cambridge, at 11 a.m. Miss Steele is survived by a brother, Harry Y. Steele, of Grand Forks, North Dakota.