Tributes to Nina Baym (1936–2018)

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A wonderful thing about our profession is we can make friends of folk we have never met. That's what happened with Nina Baym and me. Unlike Nina, I had not heard of the famous quotation about scribbling women and triple-barreled names, but I too had been through the entire standard set of readings and rituals that made for a PhD and also wondered where the women were. Woman's Fiction revealed a lot both in content and in style. Although I value the information, I was most influenced by her style: concise, clear, and coherent. Baym's books had little of the academic flourishes, intellectual obfuscation, and what I read as self-aggrandizement characteristic of too many scholars, critics, and theorists. Her work articulated, validated, and exemplified my inchoate ideas about exclusion perfected by definitions and criteria based upon limited, even predetermined, data. I really didn't want to meet her, because sometimes the imagined friend is quite superior to the real person.

But, not so in the instance of Nina Baym. When our paths finally crossed, Nina Baym was open and accessible, welcoming and real. She had a laugh that made me smile and eyes that looked right at me as if she saw not what I symbolized but who I am. We didn't exchange home phone numbers, so we clearly did not become BFFs. But there was always a nod and smile, a quick word or suggestion, a sense that we were kindred. And, ever after when I read her work, I felt her energy and her passion for inclusive, relevant research and knew that she was working really hard to get it right, not just for the reviewers but for readers of every ilk.

Frances Smith Foster

Emory University

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It took a long time for me to reconcile "Nina Baym" and "Professor Baym," and when, after I'd finished my doctorate, she told me I should call her Nina, I simply stuttered, "Uh . . . thanks, Professor Baym."

"Nina Baym" stared at me whenever I looked at the Nortons on my shelves, or at her host of books and articles that challenged disciplinary assumptions on canonical white men from Hawthorne and Cooper to James and Hemingway, or at her massive work on American women writers that was not only fieldshaping but field-making.

Don't get me wrong: wonderful teacher that she was, Professor Baym was intimidating enough. She had a way of commanding a room that made even the tallest among us feel like we were looking up, and a powerful certainty that "old-fashioned" archival work could be—and had to be—made new again. She brooked no foolishness.

Here's the story I tell most often about Professor Baym.

Back when you could bring scissors on a plane, Professor Baym brought one of my drafts in her carry-on. When she returned, she handed me a stack of paper: cut-out pieces taped together on new sheets with markings everywhere.

Then she handed me a stack of odd pieces of all shapes and sizes.

I think I looked at that second stack and asked, "What are these?"

"What's left."

I had agonized over those pages. The sea of ink, I had expected. But she had sliced, diced, and handed me shavings for the trash. The nerve. The arrogance.

But also . . .

The effort of thinking through all those words. The patience. The willingness to help me make something that people could really read and use. The kindness. The care.

"Every word matters," she was saying, "every word."

This was not the last cut-up draft she handed me, nor the last moment when I learned how deeply connected the scholar and teacher were—for both "Nina Baym" and "Professor Baym" were all about moving our conversations forward, about making things for real use.

That piece eventually became my first published article, and the conversations we had on Harriet Wilson, nineteenth-century...