In Memoriam: Karen Dandurand, Founder and Foremother

Karen Dandurand, one of the founding editors of Legacy, died on 12 September 2011, of cancer. She was associate professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where she had worked since 1986 and had served as the director of that university’s literature and criticism program.

Professor Dandurand received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her dissertation, titled “Why Dickinson Did Not Publish,” summarizes the direction and themes of much of her subsequent scholarship. In the early 1980s she discovered the texts of four poems by Dickinson that made clear the poet’s support of the Union cause (American Literature 56.1 [1984]: 17–27). She also established that Dickinson had published “Nobody knows this little rose” (J 35) during her lifetime. In recent years she devoted her studies to the nineteenth-century diarist and adventurous traveler Susan Hale.

A model of feminist scholarship, Karen was mentor to many, drawing from them their best work through example and through her tireless support. Deborah Ryals, one of her doctoral students, describes her as “a kind and gentle spirit with a true love of literature.”

She was a supporter of the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst and the Olana Partnership, as well as a member of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society and a founding member of the Society for the Study of Rebecca Harding Davis and Her World.

A meticulous researcher, Karen exemplified our ideals of archival recovery work and opened a venue through which many of us found support for and furtherance of our own scholarship on women. Her interests led her to work with others to pave the way for two foundational initiatives that have guided our research since the mid-1980s.

With two other graduate students at Amherst, Joanne Dobson and Martha Ackmann, she established a journal devoted to research about nineteenth-century women writers, the publication we now know as Legacy, the premier journal in US women’s literature. Karen remained an integral part of the journal’s editorial staff throughout her career.

In the 1990s, she and Sharon M. Harris founded the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. She served as one of its first vice-presidents and was an active officer in the society until very recently.

These lines from Emily Dickinson seem especially appropriate as a memorial to Karen

What is—“Paradise”— Who live there— . . . . . . . . . Do they know that this is “Amherst”— And that I—am coming—too—

Former students, colleagues, and friends of Karen have sent the following tributes to her.

Few people in our field are as knowledgeable about the broad field of US women writers as was Karen. Meticulous in her own scholarship, she also aided generations of young scholars in the field, both as a teacher and as an editor. Karen never liked the limelight; but she was always there, working steadily to promote women’s writings. She began her career with a love of Emily Dickinson, but she also loved lesser-known writers such as the diarist Susan Hale. She appreciated Hale’s sense of humor and her audacious belief in her right as a woman to live her life as she chose. This was true of Karen, too. She followed her own drummer, and those of us who came to know her well always appreciated the integrity of her individual path within the profession.

Sharon M. Harris, University of Connecticut, Storrs

I first met Karen through the Emily Dickinson International Society. For me, I find it somehow comforting that I last shared a banquet table with her at our annual meeting in Amherst, 2011. Impressed by her thorough and extensive research into poems that were actually published during Dickinson’s lifetime (a research that is still ongoing, thanks to Karen’s investigations), I think it was Karen who taught me to be skeptical of pronouncements in the Dickinson literature, whether with regard to what was in fact known of her poetry during her lifetime or the dating of her poems that many take as definitive when they will always be, as T. H. Johnson noted many years ago, speculative. Karen never trumpeted her...