My friend Cora Kaplan, who has died aged 84, was a feminist trailblazer in the field of literary and cultural studies. Her 1975 critical anthology of women’s poetry, Salt and Bitter and Good: Three Centuries of English and American Women Poets, was one of the first of its kind, and her collected essays, Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism (1986), played a key role in ushering feminist readings of fiction, poetry, and popular culture into the mainstream of literary studies.
In her 2007 book Victoriana, she reappropriated the term to demonstrate how 19th-century values and voices were seeping into the cultural and political atmosphere. Her prolific work as an editor included Imagining British Slavery with John Oldfield (2009), and the 10-volume series The History of British Women’s Writing, with Jennie Batchelor (2010-18).
Born in New York, Cora was the daughter of Emma (nee Nogrady), a college librarian, and Sidney Kaplan, professor of English at the University of Massachusetts. Together, her parents were pioneers in African American studies, writing books on black culture and history in the US.
After attending Northampton high school, Cora studied English at Smith College, graduating in 1961. She subsequently began a PhD at Brandeis University, but left before completion to take up a lectureship post in the school of English and American studies at Sussex University (1969-88). She subsequently held a chair in English at Rutgers University in New Jersey (1989-95), and returned to the UK as professor, and from 2005 professor emerita, at Southampton University.
She was also a visiting professor at Queen Mary University of London (2005-09) and a senior research fellow at King’s College London (2011-13). She then taught at the Bread Loaf US summer school at Lincoln College, Oxford (2015-19), before retiring from teaching with the onset of the 2020 pandemic.
Cora had a gift for showing how the most intimate aspects of family and personal life percolate, often unconsciously, into our political life. For example in her 1983 essay Wild Nights – Pleasure, Sexuality, Feminism, she argued that the complex, unruly subjectivity of Mary Wollstonecraft lay at the core of the 18th-century philosopher’s politics. Following in her parents’ footsteps, she also made interventions in the field of race and culture, such as in her inaugural lecture at Southampton, Black Heroes/White Writers: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Literary Imagination.
I met her at Sussex when I began teaching there in 1976, and am one of many who, in moments of crisis, from student occupations to the backlash against feminism, relied on her judgment. She was also the most fabulous stylist of hair, clothes and food, and the most loyal and loving of friends.
Her first marriage, in 1966, was to Mark Lushington, the father of her son, Jake. They divorced in 1979, and Cora married David Glover, a sociologist, in 1988.
David and Jake survive her, as do her grandson, Gene, and brother, Paul.
