Jane Marcus

Jane Marcus (1938–2015) was a pioneering feminist literary scholar, specializing in women writers of the Modernist era, but especially in the social and political context of their writings. Focusing on Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Nancy Cunard, among many others, she devised groundbreaking analyses of Woolf's writings, upending a generation of criticism that ignored feminist, pacifist, and socialist themes in much of Woolf's work and critique of imperialism and bourgeois society. Marcus's understanding of Woolf's place within the larger context of English literature has become prevailing wisdom today in the fields affected by her theorization and research, despite the controversial nature of her positions when they were originally formulated and how much opposition she garnered from earlier scholars and critics.

Illuminating aspects of their work that had been overlooked or undervalued, Marcus was also an expert and groundbreaking scholar in relation to other key figures of the 20th century, such as Dame Rebecca West, the British composer Ethel Smyth, and Nancy Cunard. During the course of her research on West, Marcus and West became friends in the last years of West's life, and the two shared a passion for women's writings and women's perspectives, as well as for controversy, outspokenness, and original thinking from a feminist perspective. The Jane Marcus Collection is newly housed at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, and includes manuscripts of her books, talks, correspondence and research files. Her correspondence with Rebecca West as well as the poet Adrienne Rich are of particular interest to scholars working in the fields of feminist theory, gender studies, modernism, and women's history, among others. Provided by Wikipedia