RIP Nina Baym

Nina Baym was one of the important pioneer scholars who researched and publicized forgotten American women writers. She was, in a sense, part of the women’s movement of the 1970s and beyond, and in particular, one of the women scholars who re-examined the American canon, saw how biased it was, and determined to resurrect books by women writers. Baym died on June 15, 2018 at the age of 82, and this is a belated but heartfelt tribute to her. I was one of the longtime readers and English majors who was also starting to realize how male-dominated the world of literary fiction was, and who welcomed the women scholars who were trying to change this bias. I remember reading Baym’s work with excitement. She was a professor at the University of Illinois who started off by researching Nathaniel Hawthorne’s work, but in the 1970s became curious about the many lost women’s novels, and began to do research to rediscover women writers of the 19th Century. She explored the question of how it is decided which writing is significant, and realized that male critics heavily favored male writers and “male” topics. I am so deeply thankful to Nina Baym and the other women scholars of the 1970s and onward who made sure that women writers’ works were not lost to history, and who reminded us that the biases of critics in power can affect which writers are considered “good” writers who deserve to be read, studied, and remembered. The work of these women scholars was more of a revolution than is perhaps now acknowledged; is it a good thing, or not, that their conclusions are now taken for granted? In any case, it is important to remember that although Baym’s work and that of others changed the literary world forever, there are still biases that need to be fought in the world of literature.