Her father, James Crossley, was a baker in Burnley. He had first worked in a cotton mill at the age of 14.

Joyce, who has died aged 74, was a gifted dancer. When she was 11, the Sadlers Wells company awarded her a scholarship. Her father, however, stopped her taking it up on the grounds that dancing would not offer her a reliable future.

She continued her schooling locally, and passed the school certificate with higher marks than any other pupil in the borough.

Dancing remained a large part of her life, and when she was 17 she hired a hall and ran weekly dancing classes there, keeping them up when she got a place at Leeds University to read French and Spanish.

In Leeds she joined the Leeds Ballet Club, and at the university she met Denis Hirst. They were married in 1957.

After graduating, she won a research scholarship in French literature, but when she discovered that her work had been plagiarised by the professor who would have supervised her, she turned instead to education. She then taught French and Spanish at Allerton High in Leeds, then a girls' grammar school.

When Mr Hirst got a job at St Peter's School, York, teaching modern languages, Joyce was appointed to The Mount Girls' School, remaining for five years before joining the staff at York College for Girls as Head of Modern Languages.

She and her husband were walkers and took up rock climbing, an activity which brought them to the Austrian Alps and the Lake District. In 1998 they retired to a cottage near Whitehaven, Cumbria, where Mrs Hirst took up writing.

Her output consisted mostly of historical and autobiographical articles for magazines, but she did write a romantic novel, Castle of Dreams.

Joyce is remembered by those she taught and worked with as an extremely dignified person; self-effacing, fiercely independent of mind, resilient and with an indomitable spirit. She also delighted those who knew her with her impish sense of humour.

The funeral service will be at St Peter's School chapel on Tuesday, June 24, at 11.30am.