https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/05/books/doris-grumbach-dead.html

By Robert D. McFadden
Nov. 5, 2022
Doris Grumbach, 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 on Friday in Kennett Square, Pa. She was 104.

Ms. 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 the Covid-19 of recent years.

Ms. Grumbach was as prolific as she was versatile. She wrote seven novels, six memoirs, a biography of the writer Mary McCarthy, and book reviews and literary criticism for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The 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. But 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...

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