In Memoriam

Shari Benstock, Editor of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature from 1983 to 1986, passed away on 26 May 2015, from complications due to early onset dementia. Born Shari Gabrielson and known as Shari Gabrielson Goodmann after her marriage to Thomas Goodmann, her colleague at the University of Miami, she was a central figure in the founding and flourishing of feminist literary study and a groundbreaking scholar of modernist literature. An immensely prolific writer, her books included Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940 (1986), Textualizing the Feminine: On the Limits of Genre (1991), and No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton (1994). She additionally edited Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth in 1994, as well as several important collections of essays, including Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship (1987), which was first published as the Spring/Fall 1984 issue of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings (1988). In collaboration with Bernard Benstock, her husband for two decades until his death in 1994, she produced Who’s He When He’s at Home: A James Joyce Directory (1980) and edited Coping with Joyce: Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium (1989). With her close friend and collaborator, Suzanne Ferriss, Professor of English at Nova Southeastern University, she edited On Fashion (1994), Footnotes: On Shoes (2001), and A Handbook of Literary Feminisms (2002). Her work is widely respected and has been translated into more than half a dozen languages.

No list of publications can capture her scholarly accomplishments and influence, especially in women’s literary history and feminist theory. While Editor of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, she expanded the journal’s purview from a focus on recovering women’s writing and restoring a lost history of those writers to a sustained examination of feminist literary theory. As she wrote (with the assistance of Suzanne Ferriss) in an essay for the journal’s silver jubilee (Spring 2007), “If the journal had focused on the ‘who,’ ‘what,’ and ‘why’ of women’s writing, it now also asked ‘how,’ pressing for examination of its own critical assumptions, and inviting contributions from beyond its original borders—of language, race, and class” (p. 12). This expansion of the journal’s mandate and mission has remained in place to the present day.

Shari Benstock left the University of Tulsa in 1986. From that year until 2006, she was Professor of English at the University of Miami, where she founded the university’s Program in Women’s and Gender Studies and served as Chair of the English Department and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs in the College of Arts and Sciences. At both universities, and in the fields of feminist and modernist studies, she is deeply missed, even as her influence will long be felt.