Remembering Linda Peterson

Photo of Linda Peterson by Fred Strebeigh, March 9, 2012. He notes that it was taken on the slopes of Aconcagua, the highest point in the Americas but not in the life of Linda Peterson, whose highest moments came thanks to her splendid friends and colleagues.

In the image shown here, released by Linda’s spouse Fred Strebeigh with the announcement of her death on June 25, 2015, Linda stands “on the slopes of Aconcagua, the highest point in the Americas,” in a scoop-neck T-shirt and hiking pants, sporting aviator sunglasses and a backpack, her hair blown back from her face by a stiff mountain breeze. This is not at first glance the Linda Peterson most of us encountered at RSVP conferences and board meetings, and I doubt that any of us ever saw her with her hands thrust in her pockets, as in this photo taken in March 2012. But the warm smile in the picture is the one that we in RSVP, as well as her countless colleagues, students, and mentees around the world, remember well. The image shows a relaxed, confident Linda, perhaps a bit amused at the traveler’s “photo-op” in which she participates but welcoming the spectator nonetheless. This, too, chimes with the generous welcome she extended to all at RSVP meetings. And the venturesome traveler reminds us that Linda was likewise adventurous as a scholar, generating new perspectives on what we all thought we already knew thanks to her gift for asking fresh questions and introducing us to texts and writers that were in plain sight but seldom discussed in prior scholarship.

She wrote her dissertation at Brown University on “Biblical Typology and the Poetry of Robert Browning” (and published essays on Browning from 1976, when she was still a graduate student, to 2012); indeed, poetry remained an important area of scholarship throughout her career. But she swiftly turned to life writing and became a leading international expert, placing an essay on John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua in PMLA in 1985. Her first book, Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation (1986), included chapters on Newman, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and Edmund Gosse. But she also included a chapter on Harriet Martineau, pointing out how rare Martineau’s Autobiography was since “virtually no women wrote within the main tradition of the spiritual autobiography or, like Martineau, attempted one of the secular variants so common for male writers.”¹ Even as she unfolded Martineau’s intervention in male tradition, Linda was of course herself intervening in standard accounts of Victorian autobiography and sage writing, which rarely discussed women writers.² Martineau’s work would remain a signal reference point for Linda; her 2007 edition of Martineau’s Autobiography for Broadview Press enables us to approach this key Victorian text from a fresh perspective. Since Martineau wrote so prolifically for Victorian periodicals and newspapers, Linda’s work on Martineau was surely one factor that led her to RSVP and her own work on periodicals.

Linda’s next book-length project unfolded with fine internal logic from the first. Not merely a sequel, Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing (1999) complicated even the inclusion of Martineau in a male tradition by demonstrating just how wide and deep the resources of women’s autobiography were. She demonstrated the diverse forms they took, including spiritual autobiography (now attributed to Martineau and also to Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna), missionary biography, and the artist’s life (Margaret Oliphant) as well as fictional forms, from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh to the hybrid forms adapted from Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot in the novels of Mary Cholmondeley. More than reframing a known body of work, Linda reconstructed an entire tradition, and her opening chapter mapped many then-unknown works of spiritual autobiography, domestic memoirs, professional artists’ lives, and chroniques scandaleuses (as in the work of Mary Robinson, poet, actress, and sometime mistress of George IV). Notable for the immensely wide reading and research out of which it emerges, as well...