About

Far below is a general history of my career which, re-reading, seems like  brag sheet; but there it is.

This past year I’ve been struggling to find another subject–since writers must write, right? I’d settled on Waylon Jennings, not an obvious topic for me, but I’ve loved his voice since I found a Best of Waylon Jennings tape at a small flea market in Lake Tomahawk in the north woods. That was about 1990, I guess. Couldn’t believe the depth, range, anguish and humor of that dark, melodious baritone. And I’ve never particularly liked country, except for Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash. Over the years I’ve collected Waylon CDs. Finally, in January 2013, I proposed that I do his biography to my agent. My agent had never heard of Waylon. “Obviously I can’t be the agent for this book.” She did me the favor of asking another agent, who told her that a bio of Waylon wouldn’t sell mainly because he’d done a tell-all memoir not that long ago. I’ve ordered that book from Amazon.com (shame on me). Anyway, hopes of a Waylon biography dies fast. That leaves me with the memoir I’ve been writing. Absolute hell to write about your own childhood, when you’ve been writing for 35 years about other people’s lives. And who will be interested? In 2011 my “autobiography” SUMMERS: A TRUE LOVE STORY was published by Xlibris. O shame, a vanity press publication. I didn’t care. These are letter between me and a man who chooses to be identified as Rob–and I think they tell a wonderful tale. Poignant, true (because they’re real letters) and universal: a boy and a girl trying to find themselves. Anyway: here’s the official:

In 1973 the University of Wisconsin Press published my first book, CHARLOTTE BRONTE: STYLE IN THE NOVEL, a study of the great Victorian novelist’s compelling prose style. Feeling that I had more to say about Brontë from a feminist perspective, I continued work on the author. UNQUIET SOUL: A BIOGRAPHY OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE was published by Doubleday in 1975. It was, according to my now-famous editor Lisa Drew, the best reviewed Doubleday book of the year; and won the 1975 Friends of American Writers Best Work of Prose Award.
Meanwhile, having earned a PHD in Victorian Literature and linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I taught English, linguistics and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Put off by the often-impenetrable jargon forced upon scholarly writers, I returned to biography and my longtime love, the theater. BERNARD SHAW AND THE ACTRESSES (Doubleday 1980) and MRS. PAT: THE LIFE OF MRS. PATRICK CAMPBELL (Knopf 1984) both won the George Freedley Award for Best Drama Book and Banta Award for contributing significantly to the history of ideas.
Pursuing my passion for the theater, but returning stateside from across the Pond, I undertook the major job of telling the story of the legendary  acting families, the Drews and the Barrymores. THE HOUSE OF BARRYMORE (Knopf,  1990) won the English Speaking Union’s Ambassador Book Award for best interpreting American culture to other English-speaking countries.
I’ve been lucky to receive Guggenheim, Rockefeller, American Council of Learned Societies, and Wisconsin Institute for Research in the Humanities fellowships. I held the post of Kathe Tappe Vernon professor of biography at Dartmouth College in 1978, lectured at Harvard University, spoke at international biographical conferences, and have been a frequent guest speaker at Shaw Festival seminars in Canada and the United States. She is also the author of numerous essays and reviews about theater, the Brontës, biography, and women’s issues.
Like many scholars, I had a novel in my drawer–as well as a play. My thriller WILD JUSTICE (under the name Margret Pierce because my agent thought it would ruin my reputation) was published in 1995 by St. Martin’s Press in hard and paperback (MOST WANTED), and my play PERSUASIONS, written about her old pals Bernard Shaw, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, has been given dramatic readings in New York, Milwaukee, and London. My poetry has been published in numerous journals.
May Sarton–American novelist, poet, lesbian, and the author of widely-read journals like JOURNAL OF A SOLITUDE, PLANT DREAMING DEEP, and THE HOUSE BY THE SEA– was a decided departure as a biographical subject for me, chiefly because Sarton was living.  Between 1991 and 1995, I flew four times a year to York, Maine, to spend days interviewing Sarton on tape. My book MAY SARTON: A BIOGRAPHY, published in 1997 by Knopf, won the Triangle Publishing Group Judy Gran Award for the best book published that year about a gay/lesbian. It also earned me hate mail from Sarton fans who thought my biography trashed her. To them I say: I wrote what May told me about herself and what others told me about May.
After five very difficult yet rewarding years with Sarton, who died before the biography was published, I returned to the theater to write the lives of the great actors Wisconsin-born Alfred Lunt and his British wife Lynn Fontanne. DESIGN FOR LIVING: ALFRED LUNT AND LYNN FONTANNE  (Knopf 2003) was sheer joy to write, the biography coinciding with the restoration of the Lunts’ Genesee Depot, Wisconsin, estate Ten Chimneys, spearheaded by the visionary late Joe Garton.
Besides afore-mentioned awards, I’ve  received five Wisconsin Library Association awards for “Outstanding Achievement by a Wisconsin Author” and am an inductee into the Milwaukee Library’s Wall of Fame. This thrills me because my name is right up there  beside that of the great Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker. My’s seventh biography, LORINE NIEDECKER: A POET’S LIFE, was published in Fall 2011 by University of Wisconsin Press. Since then I’ve given  20 talks about Lorine to various Wisconsin groups. My privilege.
I’m the mother of Marc and Claire Peters. I live in Lake Mills with my husband Peter Jordan, Katie the collie, and our Persian cats, Plumchin and Sweetie Pie. I’m a passionate bridge player, gardener, jigsaw puzzle worker, movie goer, collector of antique Halloween, and almost know how to operate my digital camera and wordpress site.