Poet, biographer, feminist Diane Middlebrook dies of cancer at 68

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(12-15) 15:42 Pacific Time San Francisco --
Diane Middlebrook, the award-winning poet, biographer, teacher, feminist and salonnière, died of malignant neoplastic disease Saturday in San Francisco, her household said. She was 68.

A professor of English Language at Leland Stanford University for 35 years, Middlebrook made a graceful and unusual leaping from instruction poesy to authorship biography.

She is perhaps best known for "Anne Sexton: A Biography," the controversial 1991 bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award, and for "Her Husband: Teddy Boy Ted Hughes and Plath, a Marriage," the bestselling 2003 life about the troubled labor union of the poets Sylvia Sylvia Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. She also wrote "Suits Me: The Double Life of Truncheon Tipton," the 1998 life of a female wind instrumentalist who lived as a man.

At the clip of her death, she was at work on a 4th life - "Young Ovid" - which will be published soon by Viking Penguin, to cooccur with the 2,000th day of remembrance of the birth of the Roman poet.

Middlebrook was born in Pocatello, Idaho, in 1939, one of three girls of Seth Thomas and Helen Of Troy Wood, a druggist and a nurse, and grew up in Spokane, Wash.

As a child, she was always writing. "I had a verse form in the Spokane Daily History on the sketch page when I was 8 old age old," she told an interviewer in 2002. "It remains in my head as a very electrifying experience."

After graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1961 from the University of Washington, Seattle, she went on to Yale University University, where she earned a master's grade in 1962 and a doctor's degree in 1968. She was one of the first women to learn in the English section at Leland Stanford University, where she was hired as an helper professor while still in alumnus school.

During the course of study of a eminent career, Middlebrook received many honors, including a Solomon Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanistic Discipline Fellowship, and a Pew Foundation research grant. She was a 1990 chap at the John D. Rockefeller Survey Center in Bellagio, Italy, and have been a chap of the Royal Society of Literature in Greater London since 2004.

She also created a series of literary salons for women, inspired by her numerous friendly relationships and professional confederations with female authors and artists.

"Diane have a certain glow that ranges out and pulls people," said writer and Leland Stanford senior research scholarly person Marilyn Yalom, who have been co-host of the San Francisco salon. Middlebrook went on to establish a 2nd salon for her co-workers in London; in New York, writers Kamy Wicoff and Nancy Glenn Miller co-host a salon based on Middlebrook's model.

"Often poets and academicians are really more than interested in books and writing," said Rena Rosenwasser, co-founder of Kelsey Street Press in Berkeley. "But Diane was interested in people, especially in women and what they were encountering in their professional lives."

Middlebrook said the salons served as an extension of her life as a professor. "Women have got a different sort of conversation," she said in a recent interview with The Chronicle. "Everybody who take parts is there on an equal basis."

In 1963, she married Jonathan Middlebrook, a chap alumnus pupil in literature. Their daughter, Leah, was born in 1966, and Jonathan Middlebrook was hired as a professor of English Language at San Francisco State University, where he have continued to teach. The matrimony ended in 1972. (A little early matrimony ended in 1961.)

In 1985, Diane Middlebrook married Carl Djerassi, emeritus professor of chemical science at Leland Stanford University, who is best known for contributing to the development of the first unwritten preventive pill, an innovation that brought him a fortune. In recent years, Djerassi turned to authorship novels and plays.

"They each met their match," Dale Djerassi said of his father's matrimony to Middlebrook. "She was clearly his literary counselor, critic and muse."

Their Russian Hill apartment, where the couple hosted many assemblages of intellects and artists, have dramatic 360-degree positions of the San Francisco Bay and an equally dramatic fine art collection, with plant by Alice Paul Klee. They also lived portion of the twelvemonth in London, where they spent summertimes and the autumn theatre season.

The two collaborated on many enterprises including the creative activity of the Djerassi Residence Artists Program in the Santa Cruz mountains, an people settlement founded in award of Djerassi's girl Pamela, an creative person who took her life in 1978.

Middlebrook liked to see creative, talented people thrive. "Diane was fabulous at drawing us out, making an environment where women could speak about their dreams, about things they wanted to contrive and do," said San Francisco creative person Squeak Carnwath. "And then, they would happen."

At one salon, Carnwath posed a question: Is it possible, without money, to begin a foundation to profit artists? "That was 5 or 6 old age ago, and now the Artist Bequest Foundation just gave away its first grant this year," she said.

"Diane is not just a great mind and a Godhead and a gracious human being," said writer Kate Moses, with whom Middlebrook shared research when they were both workings on books about Sylvia Plath and Hughes. "Diane also have this great well of womanlike and nurturing." From 1977 to 1979, she was manager of Stanford's Center for Research on Women, where she worked closely with Yalom.

"Those were the old age in which feminist scholarship was taking root in the public imagination, but in universities it happened much more than slowly," Yalom recalled. "When Diane and I would sit down down at the mental faculty baseball club in the late '70s, it wasn't unusual for some male professor to come up over and say, 'What are you two misses plotting now?' "

These were formative times, but Yalom believes it is as a biographer that Middlebrook "came into her own. The Anne Anne Sexton life really set her on the map," Yalom said.

She began working on the Anne Sexton book in 1982, while instruction portion time. When it was published 10 old age later, the book stirred argument over disclosures of incest by Sexton. The poet's psychoanalyst - believing he owned the rights to audiotapes of his Sessions with Anne Anne Sexton - had given them to Sexton's daughter, who passed them to Middlebrook.

In authorship the book, Middlebrook was determined to avoid academic language. "I had to learn myself how to write, which was very liberating," she said. To compose biography, "you have got to fill up yourself with the writer's imagination. It was a pleasance to see that I could make it."

In 2004, Middlebrook resigned from teaching, with programs to concentrate on her authorship and on the salons. But a routine physical medical checkup discovered a return of a rare word form of liposarcoma, a slow-growing cancer for which she had surgery previously.

"What is so extraordinary is that when she got ill, she was so committed to keeping herself graphic and alive - which meant continuing on her adjacent project," Rosenwasser said. "As long as she had an troy ounce of energy, Diane was going to work on Ovid."

Kate Moses - who have been helping Nancy Miller, Middlebrook's literary executor, set up the ms - pointed out, "With the new book, Diane have created a life of a individual for whom there is no biographical information, doing it by using her accomplishment as a poet to make fully fleshed-out, imagined scenes of cardinal minutes in Ovid's life."

Since her diagnosis, Middlebrook had additional surgeries and respective types of chemotherapy, and traveled to Federal Republic Of Germany for option dendritic-cell treatments. By early autumn of this year, docs predicted small hope of recovery, and she and Djerassi returned to San Francisco.

"Diane have influenced many people, not only as a professor and a writer, but as a human beingness lucidly and courageously facing death," Yalom said.

It is affecting that Publius Ovidius Naso - who was banished from Roma but continued to believe in the eternity of his poesy - is the topic of what would be Middlebrook's last book, Moses believes. "Ovid said, 'They've taken everything from me but my talent, and my endowment is what's going to dwell on.' "

In a 2002 interview, Middlebrook compared William Shakespeare and Ovid: "Both allude to the thought that 'If you can read this, I am still alive - because I am in my language.' "

Middlebrook is survived by her husband, Carl Djerassi, professor emeritus at Stanford; daughter, Leah Middlebrook, an writer and professor of comparative literature at the University of Oregon; son-in-law, Norio Sugano, an entrepreneur; ses Michole Nicholson of Arroyo Grande (San Luis Obispo County) and Colleen Dea of Spokane, Wash.; stepson, film maker Dale Djerassi of Woodside; and stepgrandson, Alexanders Djerassi of Washington, D.C.

A commemoration for friends and co-workers of Diane Middlebrook is planned for 2 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 27, at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside.

The household petitions that contributions be made to the Building Fund for the Diane Middlebrook Residence for Writers at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program ( ), A tax-exempt organization.

E-mail Heidi Benson at .