The impact of Diane Wood Middlebrook's lifetime of teaching shows in the generations of writers and academics she mentored. Some keep a long-ago-yellowed syllabus in their files. Others may describe the moment when exposure to Middlebrook's intellectual passion piqued their interest.
Middlebrook, a feminist scholar, professor emerita of English and renowned biographer, died December 15 after a long bout with cancer. She was 68.
Born in Pocatello, Idaho, and raised in Washington state, Middlebrook was once described by her sister as a “changeling”—unique in a family where no one read poetry, let alone studied it. Yet for Middlebrook, writing was a calling.
She attended Whitman College before transferring to the University of Washington to earn her bachelor's degree. By 1966, she was an assistant professor at Stanford. She earned her PhD from Yale in 1968. In the 1970s she was tapped for Stanford's Center for Research on Women (now the Clayman Institute for Gender Research) and served as its director from 1977 to 1979. She retired in 2002 to write full time.
Her biography of poet Anne Sexton spent eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, in part because she had secured permission to use recordings of Sexton's psychotherapy sessions as research material. Although Anne Sexton raised questions about the ultimate confidentiality of patients' records, it became a finalist for the National Book Award and for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Two other biographies were also bestsellers: Suits Me, the story of Billy Tipton (a female jazz musician who lived for 50 years as a man), and Her Husband, about the marriage of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
Middlebrook's crowning achievement, however, was expected to be a biography of the ageless poet Ovid, to be published this year, some 2000 years after he walked and wrote in the streets of Rome.
Twice divorced, Middlebrook was becoming an intellectual celebrity in her own right when, in 1985, she married another: professor emeritus of chemistry Carl Djerassi, famous as the “father of the Pill.”
In a 2003 Stanford story, history professor Estelle Freedman spoke admiringly of Middlebrook: “Often, when I have to be 'on,' as at public events, I think 'WWDD.' Instead of 'What would Jesus do?' it is 'What would Diane do?' And I reach deep inside for a touch of spark, wit, words and connecting thoughts that might, in her style, embrace those around me with the intellectual and personal vibrancy that she brings with her always.”
In addition to her husband, Middlebrook is survived by her daughter, Leah Middlebrook; her stepson, Dale Djerassi; a step-grandson, and two sisters.
