Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor in Biography, Dartmouth College
Chair, Department of English
Honorary Visiting Professor, University of Exeter
Ph.D., Stanford University
204 Sanborn House
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH 03755
Gretchen.H.Gerzina@Dartmouth.EDU
Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina is the author of Carrington: A Life (about the Bloomsbury figure Dora Carrington, whose life was made into a film starring Emma Thompson); Black London (about the black population of eighteenth-century Britain), a New York Times “notable book of the year”; Frances Hodgson Burnett: The unexpected life of the author of 'The Secret Garden', and editor of the book Black Victorians/Black Victoriana. In January 2006 her Norton Critical Edition of The Secret Garden was published; the Norton Annotated Secret Garden, a lavishly illustrated coffee table version of the classic, will appear in October 2007. Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary 18th-Century Family Moved out of Slavery and into Legend, will publish on February 1, 2008 with Amistad/HarperCollins. It is the story of two former slaves, Abijah Prince and Lucy Terry Prince, in colonial Massachusetts and Vermont, who became landowners and public figures, successfully defending themselves in court. Lucy Terry Prince is considered to be the first African American poet.
She hosts the nationally-syndicated radio program “The Book Show,” which interviews authors on their recent books. Guests have included Toni Morrison, David McCullough, Anna Quindlen, A.S. Byatt, Michael Eric Dyson, Salman Rushdie, Tracy Chevalier and Michael Cunningham. Her interview with Jamaica Kincaid won an honorable mention from the Communicator Awards for those in the national media. She has appeared frequently as a radio guest in both England and America, as well as in several British television documentaries. The most recent, on Olaudah Equiano, will air in November.
She is the recipient of two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has been the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar to Great Britain. She is an honorary fellow at the University of Exeter in Devon, England. She teaches courses on the novel, biography, Bloomsbury and black literature.
-Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary 18th-Century Family Moved out of Slavery and Into Legend, HarperCollins, January 2008.
-The Annotated Secret Garden, W.W. Norton, forthcoming, October 2007.
A fully-annotated edition of the Frances Hodgson Burnett novel, containing 120 illustrations.
-Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of the Secret Garden, Rutgers University Press (US) and Chatto & Windus (UK), 2004
-Black Victorians/Black Victoriana, Rutgers University Press, 2003
-Carrington: A Life, John Norton (UK) and John Murray (USA), 1989
