Shari Benstock

Shari Gabrielson Goodmann, who published under the name Shari Benstock (1944-2015) was a feminist literary scholar.[1] She was an expert on literary modernism, and a biographer of Edith Wharton.

Life

Shari Gabrielson was born in San Diego on December 2, 1944, the daughter of Dana and Myrl (Barth) Gabrielson. She grew up in Iowa, and was educated at Luther College, Drake University and Kent State University. She married Mel Shyvers, with whom she had a son, Eric.[2] She subsequently married Bernard Benstock, a James Joyce scholar, the marriage lasting two decades until his death in 1994.[3]

From 1983 to 1986 she edited Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature.[4] With Celeste Schenck she established 'Reading Women Writing' at Cornell University Press, one of the first book series dedicated to women's writing and feminist scholarship.[1] In 1986 she published Women of the Left Bank, exploring the lives and works of some two dozen American, English and French women among the Paris expatriate literari, including Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier, Djuna Barnes, Natalie Barney, H. D. and Bryher. In this book, Benstock "completed a feminist revision of the modernist canon even as she exposed the masculinist terms by which modernism was defined".[4]

In 1986 she left the University of Tulsa for the University of Miami, staying there as faculty member until 2006. She founded the University of Miami's program in Women's and Gender Studies, and also served as Chair of the English Department and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs in the College of Arts and Sciences.[2] She married Thomas Goodmann, Associate Professor of English at the University of Miami, in 2004. He cared for her in the last decade of her life, in which she suffered from early onset dementia.[2]

Works
  • (with Bernard Benstock) Who's He When He's at Home: A James Joyce Directory, 1980
  • Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940, 1986
  • (ed.) The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings, 1988
  • (ed. with Bernard Benstock) Coping with Joyce: Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium, 1989
  • “No Gifts from Chance”: A Biography of Edith Wharton, 1994
  • (ed. with Suzanne Ferriss) On Fashion, 1994
  • (ed.) The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. 1994.
  • (ed. with Suzanne Ferriss) 'Footnotes: On Shoes, 2001.
  • (with Suzanne Ferriss) A Handbook of Literary Feminism, 2002

References
  1. Suzanne Ferriss, In Memoriam: Shari Gabrielson Goodmann
  2. Shari Gabrielson Goodmann, founder of Women’s and Gender Studies, Passes Away, University of Miami, May 29, 2015.
  3. Memoriam, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Fall 2015), p.222.
  4. Laura M. Stevens, From the Editor: Remembering Shari Benstock, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Fall 2015), pp.223-230.
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