Elaine Showalter papers (MS.2020.007)

Biographical/Historical Note

Elaine Showalter was born on January 21, 1941, in Boston, Massachusetts. She studied English at Bryn Mawr College (B.A., 1962), Brandeis University (M.A., 1964), and the University of California, Davis (Ph.D., 1970). She turned her doctoral thesis into her first book, "A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing" (1977), a study in which she created a critical framework for analyzing literature by women.

Showalter joined the faculty of Douglass College, the women's division of Rutgers University, in 1969, where she developed women's studies courses and began editing and contributing articles to books and periodicals about women's literature. She later taught at Rutgers and Princeton University and has been a television critic for People magazine and a commentator on BBC radio and television. Showalter specializes in Victorian literature and the Fin-de-siècle and often writes on madness and hysteria in literature, specifically in women's writing and in the portrayal of female characters. She is the founder of gynocriticism – "a female framework for the analysis of women's literature."

Showalter retired from Princeton University in 2003. She now divides her time between Washington, D.C. and London, where she was recently elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2012, she also received an honorary degree from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for "A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx" (2009).