Dear Colleagues,
I write with great sadness to report that Janet Adelman — who might be called one of the great feminist readers of Shakespeare, or one of the great psychoanalytic readers of Shakespeare, but who would more rightly be called one of the truly great readers of her generation — died of lung cancer yesterday morning. I know many of you already have heard this sad news, which seems to me to suggest a gap in nature. But I know that those of you fortunate enough to have heard her talk on Book I of The Faerie Queene at the Spenser Luncheon a few short years ago know that the loss counts for all of us, not only those of us who count ourselves as Shakespeareans. (And on that score, is there any other name that appears in the suggested bibliographies with such frequency?)
Janet was my thesis director, a scholar I had not met on the UC-Berkeley campus until after I had finished an astonishing amount of coursework (it doesn't do to remember just how many years of our youth was required by Comp Lit). I heard her give the Gayley lecture on Richard Crookback, and had for the first time a feeling that was often to have when I heard her speak afterwards: not, "that's brilliant," or "just great," which of course it was, but "Oh, that's _right_." Followed by, "I have to take a course from that woman." I wrote a dissertation with her guidance; and at no time did she urge me to be a "mini-me." She was generous, exacting, rigorous, and, always, right.
She wrote a book called Suffocating Mothers. I don't believe she struggled even once to keep on her side of the professional bargain (and her avocation as a mother of real sons is legendary). My own mother is named Janet, and it never seemed relevant to dwell on it. No jokes about the reign of two Janets. My favorite moment came when I decided to hole up with a chapter, on Troilus and Cressida, and think of it as an awkward thing to have to write. I happened to run into Janet on the Berkeley campus after about six weeks, and the location was Sather Gate. She spotted me, floated from one side of the gate to the other, kissed one cheek and said, "Heather! Why don't you bring me a chapter?" She kissed the other cheek, and she floated off to Wheeler Hall. I went home and wrote the chapter. She kissed it out of me.
Heather
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