Donovan, Josephine (1941 - )

Genre: Non-Fiction, Non-Fiction - Scholarly

Born in Manila in 1941, Donovan was evacuated from the Philippines with her mother a few months before Pearl Harbor. Her father, a Captain in the U. S. Army, remained in the Philippines where he was captured by the Japanese in 1942, remaining a P.O.W. for the duration. His memoirs, edited by his daughter, were recently published as P.O.W. in the Pacific: Memoirs of an American Doctor in World War II.

She graduated, cum laude, from Bryn Mawr College in 1962 with a major in history, after spending her Junior Year in Europe. After graduation she worked as a Copy Desk clerk at The Washington Post and Time Magazine and as a general assignment reporter on a small newspaper in upstate New York. During this period she completed a course in Creative Writing at Columbia University.

She received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1967 and 1971, respectively. She has held academic positions at several universities and worked for a time as a Copy Editor for G. K. Hall in Boston. She recently retired early from her position as Professor of English (tenured) at the University of Maine, Orono, in order to devote full time to her writing. She lives on the coast of Maine.

Selected Bibliography

  • Sarah Orne Jewett (1980)
  • New England Local Color Literature: A Women?s Tradition (1983)
  • Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions of American Feminism (1985)
  • After the Fall: The Demeter-Persephone Myth in Wharton, Cather and Glasgow (1989)
  • Gnosticism in Modern Literature: A Study of Selected Works of Camus, Sartre, Hesse, and Kafka (1990)
  • Uncle Tom?s Cabin: Evil, Affliction, and Redemptive Love (1991)
  • Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405-1726 (1999)