Phyllis Rose | |
|---|---|
 Phyllis Rose portrait by Ed Lefkowicz | |
| Born | Phyllis Davidoff |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | American |
Phyllis Rose (born October 26, 1942) is an American literary critic, essayist, biographer, and educator.
Phyllis Rose | |
|---|---|
| Phyllis Rose portrait by Ed Lefkowicz | |
| Born | Phyllis Davidoff |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | American |
Phyllis Rose (born October 26, 1942) is an American literary critic, essayist, biographer, and educator.
Phyllis Rose was born Phyllis Davidoff, the third child of Eli and Minnie P. Davidoff, and spent her childhood on the South Shore of Long Island, attending Lawrence (NY) High School. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1964 summa cum laude and spent the following year studying English literature at Yale University, for which work she holds an MA. She returned to Harvard to complete her graduate studies, specializing in nineteenth-century English literature and receiving a Ph.D. in 1970 with a dissertation on Charles Dickens, written under the direction of Jerome Hamilton Buckley. [1] Rose is Jewish. [2] [3]
She began her teaching career in 1969 as an assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, and rose progressively to associate professor and full professor with tenure in 1976. She remained on the faculty of Wesleyan until her early retirement in 2005, spending one year (1981–82) as a visiting professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley. [4]
Rose's first book, Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Published in 1978, it was in the forefront of feminist re-evaluations of literary figures and generated a renewed interest among US literary critics in Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. [5]
Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages, which considered the institution of marriage by exploring the marriages of five prominent Victorian writers, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1983. It details the intimate relationships and/or marriages of Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle, Effie Grey and John Ruskin, Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill, Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens, and George Eliot and George Henry Lewes. Anatole Broyard in The New York Times called it a “brilliant and original book.” [6] In 2018, Haley Mlotek gave the book extravagant praise in a "Letter of Recommendation" published in the New York Times. [7]
The research surrounding Rose's biography of the African-American dancer, Josephine Baker, titled Jazz Cleopatra, was supported by a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation [8] and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It was published by Doubleday in 1989 and has since been translated into many languages.
Rose has published countless shorter essays throughout her career, some as a guest columnist for The New York Times in 1983–84, [9] many for The American Scholar, [10] on whose editorial board she has long served. Other essays and book reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, [11] The Boston Globe, Vogue, The New York Times Book Review, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Yale Review, Preservation, Civilization, and The New Republic, among others. Her travel writing was regularly published by The Sophisticated Traveler section of The New York Times. Some of her essays were collected in Writing of Women (Wesleyan University Press, 1985) and some in Never Say Goodbye (Doubleday, 1991).
For The Norton Book of Women’s Lives (1993), a collection of diaries and memoirs, Rose selected the texts and wrote introductions to each author's work, as well as a general introduction to the volume. Library Journal said of it, “Because of the breadth and richness of these 61 selections, . . . this anthology is destined to become a classic.” [12] The Hungry Mind Review called it a “magnificent, handsome, handful of an anthology.” [13]
Since publishing The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time (Scribner, 1997), an account of her engagement with Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time , Rose has taken a long sabbatical from book-writing and devoted herself to photography, [14] [15] specializing in portraits. She has had two shows of her art work at the Lucky Street Gallery in Key West, Florida. [16]
In 2014, Rose published The Shelf: From LEQ to LES, an account of reading all of the novels on a particular shelf in the stacks of the New York Society Library. A Kirkus reviewer explains Rose's method as follows: “She chose the shelf on the basis of a few self-imposed rules: Several authors needed to appear, and only one could have more than five books, of which she would read three; there would be both contemporary and older works; one book needed to be a classic that she had always wanted to read.” [17] Elaine Showalter wrote that "Rose turns naturally to the tools of the contemporary reader—Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, Kindle, iPad—and moves easily between the shelf and the immediately accessible riches of the culture. [18]
Rose has a son, Ted Rose, from her first marriage, which ended in 1975. In 1990, she married Laurent de Brunhoff, [19] the French-born author and illustrator of the Babar the Elephant books. Since 1985, Rose has worked with him on the series. [20] [21] They live in Key West, Florida and New York City.
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer. She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors. She pioneered the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
In Search of Lost Time, first translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past, and sometimes referred to in French as La Recherche, is a novel in seven volumes by French author Marcel Proust. This early 20th-century work is his most prominent, known both for its length and its theme of involuntary memory. The most famous example of this is the "episode of the madeleine", which occurs early in the first volume.
Babar the Elephant is an elephant character who first appeared in 1931 in the French children's book Histoire de Babar by Jean de Brunhoff.
A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf, first published in September 1929. The work is based on two lectures Woolf delivered in October 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College, women's colleges at the University of Cambridge.
Jean de Brunhoff was a French writer and illustrator remembered best for creating the Babar series of children's books concerning a fictional elephant, the first of which was published in 1931.
Laurent de Brunhoff was a French author and illustrator, known primarily for continuing the Babar the Elephant series of children's books that was created by his father, Jean de Brunhoff.
Dame Hermione Lee, is a British biographer, literary critic and academic. She is a former President of Wolfson College, Oxford, and a former Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature in the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of New College. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature.
Susanne Antonetta is the pen name of Suzanne Paola, an American poet and author who is most widely known for her book Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir. In 2001, Body Toxic was named by the New York Times as a "Notable Book". An excerpt of "Body Toxic" was published as a stand-alone essay which was recognized as a "Notable Essay" in the 1998 Best American Essays 1998 anthology. She has published several prize-winning collections of poems, including Bardo, a Brittingham Prize in Poetry winner, and the poetry books Petitioner, Glass, and most recently The Lives of The Saints. She currently resides in Washington with her husband and adopted son. She is widely published both in newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as in literary journals including Orion, Brevity, JuxtaProse Literary Magazine, Seneca Review, and Image. She is the current Editor-in-Chief of Bellingham Review.
Anita Diamant is an American author of fiction and non-fiction books. She has published five novels, the most recent of which is The Boston Girl, a New York Times best seller. She is best known for her 1997 novel The Red Tent, which eventually became a best seller and book club favorite. She has also written six guides to contemporary Jewish practice, including The New Jewish Wedding,Living a Jewish Life, and The New Jewish Baby Book, as well as a collection of personal essays, Pitching My Tent.
Cécile de Brunhoff was a French storyteller and the creator of the original Babar story. She was also a classically trained pianist.
Sandra M. Gilbert is an American literary critic and poet who has published in the fields of feminist literary criticism, feminist theory, and psychoanalytic criticism. She is best known for her collaborative critical work with Susan Gubar, with whom she co-authored, among other works, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). Madwoman in the Attic is widely recognized as a text central to second-wave feminism. She is Professor Emerita of English at the University of California, Davis.
Jane Baillie Carlyle was a Scottish writer and the wife of Thomas Carlyle.
Irena Klepfisz is a Jewish lesbian author, academic and activist.
Janet Sternburg is an American writer of essays, poetry and memoir, as well as a fine art photographer. Sternburg is the editor of The Writer On Her Work, the first book of commissioned essays on what it means to be a contemporary woman who writes. It has been continuously in print since 1980, and a twentieth anniversary edition was published by W.W. Norton in 2000. Sternburg lives in Los Angeles and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Her most recent book is White Matter: A Memoir of Family and Medicine. She is married to Steven Lavine.
Men Explain Things to Me is a 2014 essay collection by the American writer Rebecca Solnit, published by Haymarket Books. The book originally contained seven essays, the main essay of which was cited in The New Republic as the piece that "launched the term mansplaining", though Solnit herself did not use the word in the original essay and has since rejected the term. The September 2015 expanded edition of the book included two new essays: "Cassandra Among the Creeps" and "#YesAllWomen: Feminists Rewrite the Story."
Cynthia Propper Seton was an American writer and feminist. Following a 12-year career as a columnist for The Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, she began writing essays and fiction, producing five novels and three essay collections. Her third novel, A Fine Romance, was a finalist for the 1977 National Book Award for Fiction.
Celestine Sibley was a famous American newspaper reporter, syndicated columnist, and novelist in Atlanta, Georgia, for nearly sixty years.
Nicola BeaumanHon. FRSL is a British biographer and journalist, and the founder of Persephone Books, an independent book publisher based in Bath.
Caroline Elizabeth Weber is an American author and fashion historian. She is a professor of French and comparative literature at Barnard College within Columbia University. Her book Proust's Duchess was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
Annette Meyers is an American mystery writer. She also writes under the shared pseudonym Maan Meyers with her writing partner and husband, Martin Meyers.
