Phyllis Rose

Phyllis Rose
Phyllis Rose portrait by Ed Lefkowicz
Born	Phyllis Davidoff
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	American

Phyllis Rose (born October 26, 1942) is an American literary critic, essayist, biographer, and educator.

Phyllis Rose was born Phyllis Davidoff, the third child of Eli and Minnie P. Davidoff, and spent her childhood on the South Shore of Long Island, attending Lawrence (NY) High School. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1964 summa cum laude and spent the following year studying English literature at Yale University, for which work she holds an MA. She returned to Harvard to complete her graduate studies, specializing in nineteenth-century English literature and receiving a Ph.D. in 1970 with a dissertation on Charles Dickens, written under the direction of Jerome Hamilton Buckley.

She began her teaching career in 1969 as an assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, and rose progressively to associate professor and full professor with tenure in 1976. She remained on the faculty of Wesleyan until her early retirement in 2005, spending one year (1981-82) as a visiting professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley.

Rose's first book, Woman of Letters: A Biography of Virginia Woolf, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Published in 1979, it was in the forefront of feminist re-evaluations of literary figures and raised interest in Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages, which considered the institution of marriage by telling the stories of the marriages of some Victorian writers, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1983. Anatole Broyard in The New York Times called it a “brilliant and original book.”

Work on her biography of the African-American dancer, Josephine Baker, called Jazz Cleopatra, was supported by a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It was published by Doubleday in 1989 and translated into many languages.