Lasting Memories

Diane Middlebrook
1939-Dec. 15, 2007
San Francisco, California

Diane Middlebrook, noted biographer, early director of feminist studies and a Stanford faculty member for four decades, died in San Francisco Saturday from cancer. She was 68.

Middlebrook wrote a best-selling 1991 biography of poet Anne Sexton ("Anne Sexton") and a biography of English poet Ted Hughes and his wife, the poet Syvia Plath, ("Her Husband") in 2003.

She also wrote "Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton," about a cross-dressing jazz musician, in 1998.

She leaves behind a manuscript that will be published in 2008 -- a biography of Ovid, a writer who was banished from Rome 2,000 years ago.

"I think her legacy as a biographer is her incredible humanity," San Francisco writer Kate Moses said. "She never sacrificed humanity in making an acute critical recognition of her subject."

Her editor, Kathryn Court, president of Penguin Books, praised Middlebrook for her "enormous intellect and great perspicacity."

Middlebrook was born in Pocatello, Idaho, and moved with her family to Spokane, Wash., when she was 5.

She attended Whitman College and received a bachelor's degree from the University of Washington in 1961. She joined the Stanford faculty as an assistant professor of English in 1966 and received her doctorate from Yale in 1968.

While at Stanford, she was the director of the new Center for Research on Women in 1977-79.

She was married three times, including to Carl Djerassi, known as the "father of the pill," who is a Stanford professor emeritus of chemistry. They married in 1985.

In recent years, Middlebrook and Djerassi divided their time between their San Francisco and London homes.

Middlebrook is survived by Djerassi; her daughter, Leah Middlebrook of Eugene, Ore.; her sisters, Michole Nicholson of Arroyo Grande, Calif., and Colleen Dea of Spokane, Wash.; her stepson, Dale Djerassi of Woodside; and her step-grandson, Alexander Djerassi of Washington, D.C.