Middlebrook, Diane Wood 1939-2007 (Diane Middlebrook, Diane W. Middlebrook, Helen Diane Wood)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born April 16, 1939, in Pocatello, ID; died of cancer, December 15, 2007, in San Francisco, CA. Feminist scholar, educator, biographer, and author. Middlebrook was one of the first tenured women to teach English literature at Stanford University in 1966. When she retired from the university in 2002, she had taught as the Howard H. and Jessie T. Watkins University Professor and served as the founding director of the Center for Research on Women (now known as the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research). She was best known for her feminist scholarship and her award-winning studies of women poets. Middlebrook's most celebrated projects focused on the lives of complex, stunningly gifted, yet pathologically flawed women. It took her ten years to research and write Anne Sexton: A Biography (1991), about the Pulitzer Prize winner who used her poetry as a desperate weapon against suicide, until she finally lost her battle in 1974 at age forty-five. Middlebrook was roundly criticized for spelling out the poet's flagrant behavioral aberrations and for using audio tapes from Sexton's many psychiatric sessions as source materials (albeit with permission from both the doctor and the poet's heirs). The book was also acclaimed as a sensitive portrayal of a gifted, tormented life cut short, and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Middlebrook next looked at the British poet Ted Hughes. She found herself unable, however, to separate the poet from his wife, Sylvia Plath, another so-called and equally troubled "confessional poet" who ended her gifted life by suicide at age thirty. Like Anne Sexton, Her Husband: Hughes and Plath, a Marriage (2003) was appraised as a balanced, thoughtful look at a life that perhaps burned too bright and too fast to endure. Between these two projects, Middlebrook came upon the papers of the unusual jazz musician Billy Tipton, who spent fifty years living as a man with five different wives until doctors discovered, as he lay dying, that he had actually been born a woman. Middlebrook became a finalist for the Lambda Foundation Literary Award for her study Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton (1998). At the time of her death, Middlebrook had also completed a life of the Roman poet Ovid, which she intended to publish in 2009, to commemorate the 2,000th observance of the poet's birth. Middlebrook's literary output may have been relatively small, but it earned her much recognition, including numerous fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, the Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, and other institutions. In addition to her biographies, Middlebrook had also published some poetry and literary criticism.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, December 20, 2007, sec. 3, p. 9.

Los Angeles Times, December 18, 2007, p. B8.

New York Times, December 17, 2007, p. A25.

Times (London, England), December 20, 2007, p. 56.

Washington Post, December 17, 2007, p. B6.