|
 Julia Markus is a biographer, educator, scholar, and writer whose career spans over four decades. Educated at Boston College (BA ‘61, MA 62) and University of Maryland (PhD ‘76), Markus specialized in the nineteenth century poetry of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, working for the Browning Institute, editing The Browning Institute Studies, contributing articles, and publishing edited volumes. Along with her scholarship on the Brownings Markus contributed to the late twentieth century fiction scene, winning a Houghton Mifflin Literary Award for her first commercially published novel Uncle. La Mora and Patron of the Arts preceded Uncle and were published by small presses. American Rose (1980), Friends Along the Way (1985), and A Change of Luck (1991) followed with critical acclaim.
Markus taught at Hofstra University, ultimately becoming Director of the Creative Writing Program, where she came to mentor many early stage writers. Through her position as a fiction writer and professor she established close relationships with other authors, as evident in her lifelong correspondences. She remained a close colleague and friend to William S Peterson (University of Maryland), Miram Levine (Framingham State University), and her agent Harriet Wasserman and her papers reflect both personal and professional collaborations.
Her 1995 publication of Dared and Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning shifted the trajectory of her œuvre toward biography. Across and Untried Sea (2000), J Anthony Froude (2005), and Lady Byron and Her Daughters (2015) all received critical acclaim and saw Markus return to more traditional scholarship and writing. Dared and Done in particular gained notable public praise and resulted in considerable media coverage. Along with her fiction, biography, and scholarship Markus has written on art, culture, and travel.
Through her connections with the Byron Society in America, her papers were donated to Special Collections here at Drew University. The resulting Julia Markus papers represent a snapshot of the professional and personal life of a writer at the end of the twentieth century through the twenty-first century.
View the Julia Markus Papers Finding Aid
|
