Susan Meyer
Professor of English
Specialist in nineteenth-century fiction. Author of three novels.
I am both a children’s author and a literary critic. As a critic I study Victorian and American literature, and I am particularly interested in women writers and in the relationship between literature and social history. In Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction, I investigate the way that race relations are used as a metaphor for the relationships between men and women in the fiction of Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and George Eliot. My co-edited essay collection, The New Nineteenth Century, assembles compelling writing on lesser-known writers of the period. More recently I have been writing about the representation of Jews in the fiction of Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Edith Wharton, and about the odd preoccupation with pure water and fresh air in the fiction of Willa Cather and L. M. Montgomery.
I’m the author of three novels, Black Radishes, Skating With the Statue of Liberty, and A Sky Full of Song, and of four picture books. My most recent novel, A Sky Full of Song, is about a large family of Jewish homesteaders, refugees from persecution in the Russian Empire, homesteading in the early 1900s on the North Dakota prairie. My picture book, New Shoes, is about two African-American girls who find an inventive way to foil Jim Crow laws by creating their own second-hand shoe store. My fiction has won many awards, among them the Jane Addams Peace Association Children’s Book Award, the Sydney Taylor Honor Award, the Western Writers of America Spur Award, the Will Rogers Gold Medallion Award, and NAACP Image Award Nominee.
I teach courses in nineteenth-century British literature, nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature, and creative writing. I often teach a first-year writing class on Jane Austen—a novelist much-loved by Wellesley students!
I love kayaking, swimming, walking through the New England woods, waiting for rare books to arrive for me through interlibrary loan, visiting historic writers’ houses, and searching every fall for a perfect, just-dipped caramel apple.
Education
- B.A., Johns Hopkins University
- M.A., University of California-Los Angeles
- M.A., Yale University
- M.Phil, Yale University
- Ph.D., Yale University