Bernadette Flynn Low, an English professor and Shakespearean scholar who led tours of historic Baltimore sites, died of a brain hemorrhage April 18 at Sinai Hospital. She lived in Baltimore County’s Phoenix and was 81.

Born Frances Bernadette Flynn in El Paso, Texas, she was the daughter of Otis Flynn, a railroad worker, and Frances Flynn, who worked for a utilities firm. She attended El Paso schools and earned degrees at Texas Western College and a doctorate from the University of New Mexico.

When a vacancy opened up for an English teacher at Dundalk Community College in 1973, she applied and was immediately accepted. She soon met her future husband, John Low, a fellow English teacher. They married in 1977.

“Bernadette always had a good thing to say in a kind way. She had a wonderful relationship with her students,” her husband said.

While at what is now the Dundalk campus of the Community College of Baltimore County, she developed an early online course and founded the honors society.

“She had a profound impact on the lives of thousands of students,” said her daughter, Maggie Church. “She continued to teach English online until the day she died. Her dinnertime stories often included a quote from an essay that she graded from the people she called her ‘sweet students.’ ”

She was fascinated by the history of Baltimore and took students and others on tours of Green Mount Cemetery in collaboration with local historian Wayne R. Schaumburg. She was a board member of the Garrett-Jacobs Mansion and a docent for Evergreen Museum & Library. She was also a regular patron of Martick’s Restaurant Francais in Mount Vernon.

She developed an honors writing course, “The City as Text,” that focused on the geography, history and culture of Baltimore.

“She greeted friends and strangers alike with a joyful smile,” her daughter said. “You knew you were loved by Bernadette because she sent you a note on a beautiful card or baked you a blueberry pie.”

She was a voracious reader. She wrote her dissertation on character development in Shakespeare’s plays. On several occasions, she took her students to England for a literary tour.

Her daughter said she read “War and Peace” every other year and maintained, “It was the best novel ever written.”

“She had a lust for life and at the age of 74, set off to visit Machu Picchu by herself because she had always wanted to,” her daughter said.

For more than 40 years, she and her husband lived in an 1842 home on Shuresville Road in Darlington in Harford County.

She is survived by her husband, John Low, a retired professor at CCBC Dundalk; a son, Jack Low, of St. Petersburg, Florida; two daughters, Raissa Contreras, of Baltimore, and Maggie Church, of Glen Arm; and two grandsons.

A funeral will be held at 11 a.m. May 17 at Trinity Episcopal Church in Glen Arm.

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