Obituary: Cora Kaplan, Professor Emerita of English. 1940 - 2024

Cora Kaplan was the daughter of Sidney Kaplan, a leading scholar of African American literature, culture and history, and Emma Nogrady Kaplan, a research librarian. A graduate of Smith College, she subsequently studied at Newnham College Cambridge and Harvard, before beginning a PhD on Tom Paine at Brandeis University in 1967, passing her oral exam with Distinction. She was a feminist scholar, literary critic, and teacher of exceptional talent.

Cora joined the University of Southampton in 1996. Previously she had been a lecturer at the University of Sussex between 1969 and 1988, and a Professor of English at Rutgers University from 1989 to 1995, where she also spent three years as Director of the Institute for Research on Women. A leading feminist scholar, she was a fierce advocate for and mentor to younger colleagues, including the many undergraduate, MA and PhD students whose intellectual curiosity she inspired and whose efforts she tirelessly championed. Cora made a substantial contribution to the intellectual life of the University during her time here, and continued to support and mentor junior scholars in the English department after she left Southampton in the summer of 2005.

The incredible diversity and depth of Cora’s work, the range of her activities, and the crucial nature of her interventions in feminist criticism, Victorian Studies, neo-Victorian Studies, and African American literature garnered acclaim in Britain and America. A general sense of her importance as a critic and scholar must be based not only on her published work but also on her efforts in public lectures and to general audiences in redefining the place and importance of women’s writing, including (but by no means limited to) the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Whereas current scholarly debates in Victorian Studies revolve around “unsettling” the discipline, Cora was “unsettling” critical conventions and traditions from the 1970s onwards. In 1975, she published the ground-breaking anthology Salt and Bitter and Good: Three Centuries of English and American Poets for Paddington Press. In 1978, she edited and wrote a dazzling introduction to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh and Other Poems for the Women’s Press. In 1986, she published Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism for Verso followed by Genders with David Glover (Routledge, 2000), and Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (Columbia, 2007). In addition, she co-edited books of essays on James Baldwin, Harriet Martineau, and Women and Material Culture: 1660-1830.  A collection of her recent essays entitled Double Crossings is forthcoming from Edinburgh UP in 2025.

Her friends and colleagues all speak of Cora’s generosity. She loved a good argument, a trait that was part of her keen interest in the research of others, and her ability to listen, and her passion for the continuing relevance of her favourite writers, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Christina Rosetti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She had an exceptional gift for giving talks that brought to life vital connections between literary history and the current moment. Her attention to issues of gender, race, and class, her commitment to elaborating the relation of art to politics, her dexterity in moving between past and present and between conservative and progressive versions of modernity: these were hallmarks of Cora’s distinctive voice and radical vision.

In 1998, Cora co-organized ‘Darwin’s Millenium,’ with Lucy Hartley now at the University of Michigan. This international conference tracked some of the multiple genealogies and proliferating forms of Darwin’s thought from the mid-eighteenth century onwards and served as the launch for a new M. A. in the Culture and History of Science that Cora was instrumental in designing anf convening.

In the early 2000s, Cora played a leading role in establishing a formal relationship between the University of Southampton and Chawton House, the Hampshire country estate inherited by Jane Austen’s brother. Home to a unique collection of early women’s writing from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Chawton House’s mission to restore early women’s writers to their rightful place in literary history aligned with Cora’s career-long commitment to feminist praxis. Working with the founder, Dr Sandy Lerner, and the Chawton House board of Trustees, she put in place a programme of activities for academics, students, and the general public. In July 2003, Chawton House opened to hundreds of academics and members of the public in the form of a major international conference held at three sites: Chawton, the University of Southampton and Winchester. Jennie Batchelor, now at the University of York and a former colleague and long-time collaborator of Cora’s at the University of Southampton, recalls: ‘The conference was such an extraordinary feat. Anyone who was or now is anyone working in the field of eighteenth-century women’s writing was in Hampshire for it, drawn not only by opening of this magnificent library but by the urgent energy of Cora who made us all understand that this gathering could be the start of a sea change in our field. It proved to be exactly that.’

This was the first of many such conferences and events at Chawton, Southampton and the Institute of English Studies, London. Several of these, including the 2007 ‘Imagining Transatlantic Slavery and Abolition’ (co-organised by Cora and John Oldfield, formerly of Southampton’s Department of History), resulted in influential, cross-disciplinary essay collections. Cora also led on a major collaboration with Palgrave Macmillan, then based in nearby Basingstoke. Among the fruits of this collaboration was the publication of the ten-volume History of British Women’s Writing (2010-18) from the medieval period to the twenty-first century for which Cora and Jennie were Co-Series editors.

Cora made great contributions to the intellectual lives of students in the Department of English. She was simply a stellar teacher. In courses on women’s writing, on Victorian literature and culture, on James Baldwin, on theories of gender and sexuality, on popular fiction (and more), students consistently praised her for the astute and constructive feedback she provided, coupled with the discipline that she demanded of them. And for those who taught with Cora, she was an inspiration: a brilliant educator who in the truest sense helped to bring out the gifts in students and colleagues alike. Given her passion for teaching, her deep concern for her students, her humor, her luminous mind, and her impressive command of multiple fields, it is no wonder that she became something of a legend in the Department.

Cora is survived by a son Jake Lushington, Head of Drama at World, a grandson Gene and her husband David Glover, who was also a professor at the University of Southampton.

Words by Jennie Batchelor, Gillian Dow, Lucy Hartley, Peter Middleton.