Doris Grumbach
Author and former University of Maryland and Hopkins instructor explored the social, psychic hardships of women
Doris Grumbach, a former University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University instructor who — in novels, essays and literary criticism — explored the social and psychic hardships of women trapped in repressive families or disintegrating marriages, and who, as modern feminism came of age in the 1970s and ‘80s, portrayed lesbian characters and themes in a positive light that was then unusual in mainstream fiction, died Friday in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. She was 104.
Grumbach’s daughter Barbara Wheeler said she died at Kendal-Crosslands, a retirement community. She noted that her mother had survived two pandemics: the Spanish flu, into which she was born in 1918, and COVID-19 in recent years.
Ms. Grumbach was as prolific as she was versatile. She wrote seven novels, six memoirs, a biography of writer Mary McCarthy, and book reviews and literary criticism for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The American Scholar and other publications. She was also the literary editor of The New Republic and a commentator on NPR and “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS.
She was perhaps best known for three novels: “Chamber Music” (1979), the memoir of an aging widow who had fallen in love with a woman after learning her husband was gay; “The Ladies” (1984), about two 18th-century women who escape repressive Irish families and become reclusive lovers in Wales; and “The Magician’s Girl” (1987), about three Barnard College roommates and their troubled lives.
Critics disagreed sharply about Ms. Grumbach’s strengths and weaknesses as a writer. Some said her portraits of lesbian and gay characters and themes were unrealistic, even stereotypical. Others found them lifelike and praised her for unflinching portrayals of women who were engulfed by intolerant social conventions or caught in loveless marriages, and of families unsympathetic to female friendships that ripen into love.
Ms. Grumbach was a scholar of medieval and modern literature, the wife of a neurophysiologist for 31 years, the mother of four daughters, an officer in the Navy women’s branch during World War II, and a professor of literature and creative writing at several colleges and universities. After she divorced in midlife, she and Sybil Pike, a bookseller, were partners for more than four decades.
Ms. Grumbach, a native New Yorker who had also spent much of her life in Albany, New York, and Washington, retreated in her 70s to a small coastal town in Maine. Ms. Pike set up a rare-book store there, and Ms. Grumbach began a new burst of writing, producing her autobiographies and a collection of essays on growing old.
“The most lamentable loss in the elderly spirit is the erosion of hope,” she wrote in an opinion article for The New York Times in 1998. “Still, despite my dire description, we elderly persist with our canes, in our longterm care and miserable nursing homes and ‘rehabilitation’ centers, and in our seats confronting the idiocies of the tube. In the short run, so to speak, we are all characters in ‘Waiting for Godot.’ ”
Doris Isaac was born July 12, 1918, in Manhattan to Leonard and Helen (Oppenheimer) Isaac. Her father sold men’s clothing. She and her sister, Joan, grew up in Manhattan.
In elementary school, Doris Isaac skipped some grades and, after a brief unhappy experience at Hunter High School, entered the all-girls Julia Richman High School.
Socially unprepared, she developed a stammer, lost confidence and had poor grades. She remained an indifferent student, but she excelled in theater and creative writing. She graduated in 1935.
At Washington Square College, then the Greenwich Village campus of New York University, she majored in philosophy, studying under Sidney Hook, and avidly read medieval literature. She graduated near the top of her class in 1939 and earned a master’s degree in medieval literature at Cornell University in 1940.
In 1941, she married Leonard Grumbach, a Cornell graduate student. The couple divorced in 1972.
Ms. Grumbach’s sister, Joan Danziger, died many years ago; her daughter Jane died in 2011; Ms. Pike died in 2021. Besides her daughter Wheeler, Ms. Grumbach is survived by two other daughters, Elizabeth Cale and Kathryn Grumbach Yarowsky; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
During World War II, Ms. Grumbach’s husband was drafted and she joined the Naval Women’s Reserve, commonly known as the WAVES, an acronym for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service. After the war, the Grumbachs settled in Albany, where he taught at a medical college and she taught at a private girls’ school.
From 1960 to 1971, Ms. Grumbach taught English at the College of St. Rose in Albany. She also began writing. Her first novels, “The Spoil of the Flowers” (1962) and “The Short Throat, the Tender Mouth” (1964), attracted little notice.
Her literary biography of Ms. McCarthy, “The Company She Kept” (1967), drew wide attention. Much of it, however, was hostile.
Ms. McCarthy and Ms. Grumbach had been friends, but Ms. McCarthy filed a prepublication lawsuit, forcing Ms. Grumbach to delete material she had relied upon for her thesis that Ms. McCarthy’s fiction was thinly veiled autobiography. Ms. McCarthy scoffed at that idea, and so did many critics. Ms. Grumbach later acknowledged that it was naive.
Her later novels included “The Missing Person” (1981), about a Hollywood actress seemingly modeled on Marilyn Monroe, and “The Book of Knowledge” (1995), about the unfulfilled sexual identities of two boys and two girls who meet at a beach community.