Elaine Showalter was born Elaine Cottler on January 21, 1941, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to parents Paul Cottler and Violet Rottenberg, and grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in nearby Brookline. Neither of her parents were deeply invested in education. Her father was a wool merchant who immigrated from Kyiv and did not complete grammar school. Her mother was a housewife who had received a high school education but showed no further interest in intellectual pursuits. Showalter has mentioned that her attraction to feminism developed in reaction to witnessing the lack of richness in her mother’s life. Even though neither parent approved of her academic interests, Showalter chose to attend Bryn Mawr College in 1958; she graduated in 1962 with a bachelor’s degree in English. 

Showalter became increasingly estranged from her parents when she became engaged to English Showalter, a French professor who taught at Haverford College whom she met in her senior year of college. He was Episcopalian and her parents disapproved of her marrying a non-Jew. In 1962, she began her graduate work in English at Brandeis University, the only school she applied to; her experience at Bryn Mawr made her want to move away from the elitism of a school that made all undergraduates who were not Southern take speech lessons to learn how to adjust their “ethnic or regional accents” (Gale 1988). Bryn Mawr represented the traditional Seven Sisters model of elite women's education and “old money.” In contrast, Brandeis had a reputation for a meritocratic ethos and was known as a progressive, intellectually rigorous, Jewish-sponsored university. Despite her hope that going to Brandeis would quell her parents’ anger, they dramatically cut her off. They eventually disowned her when she married English Showalter on June 3, 1963; none of her family attended the wedding. Fifteen years later, in 1978, she reconnected with her mother and her sister, to whom she had also not spoken since her wedding. (Her father had died.) Though her relationship with her mother remained strained, she financially supported her and stayed in touch with her until her mother passed away.

Showalter completed her master’s degree at Brandeis University in 1964 and pursued her doctorate at the University of California-Davis, where English had begun teaching. When he received a position at Princeton University, the couple moved again. Once Showalter finished her doctorate in 1970, she received a position as an assistant professor at Douglass College, the women’s college of Rutgers University. In commenting on her new position, Showalter explained, “I was blessed to be in the right place at the right time. It was a moment where women’s colleges around the United States were disappearing, and there was pressure for Douglass College to be absorbed into Rutgers University” (VFA 2020).

Showalter had her first child, Vinca, in 1965 and her second child, Michael, in 1970, the same year she began her first academic job. In later interviews, she notes that “Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique had come out in 1963, and [my] husband was reading it in the Napaville county hospital in June 1965 while I was in the delivery room giving birth to our daughter Vinca,” illustrating how second-wave feminism was being born alongside Showalter’s development as a mother and academic (VFA 2020). 

Showalter was promoted in 1974 to associate professor. From 1976 to 1977, she was a visiting professor of English and women’s studies at the University of Delaware. She received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1977 and a Rockefeller Humanities fellowship in 1981 and became a full professor of English at Douglass in 1983. In 1984, Showalter moved from Douglass to Princeton University to become a professor of English; she was later given the title of Avalon Professor of Humanities. She was the first woman to chair the English department at Princeton, which only had three women chairing departments at that time. She retired from Princeton in 2003, after which she took a fellowship at the Huntington Library in California. 

Showalter has edited multiple anthologies, feminist scholarly journals, and articles. She served as the president of the Modern Language Association (MLA) from 1998 to 1999. She has received the Howard Behrman humanities award (1989), the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism (2012), and honorary degrees from University of St. Andrews and the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, Rutgers University, and the University of Roehampton in England.

Showalter is best known for her trailblazing work in feminist literary criticism. Her approach often emphasized the importance of recognizing women's voices and experiences in literature, which had been historically marginalized. In her seminal work, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, published in 1977, Showalter examined the works of British women writers and argued that they created a distinct literary tradition. She analyzed the development of female authorship, categorizing writers into three phases: the “feminine,” where women mimic male literary forms; the “feminist,” where women writers assert their own voices; and the “female,” where women develop their own independent literary tradition and models. This book not only highlighted the contributions of women writers but also laid the foundation for new feminist scholarship by establishing the importance of a female literary canon. 

In her 1979 essay “Towards a Feminist Poetics,” published in Mary Jacobus’s anthology Women Writing about Women. Showalter introduced the concept of gynocriticism, a framework for analyzing literature that centers on women's experiences and perspectives. Gynocriticism challenged traditional literary criticism, which often prioritized male authors and perspectives. Showalter argued: “Without an understanding of the framework of the female subculture, we can miss or misinterpret the themes and structures of women’s literature, fail to make necessary connections within a tradition” (“Towards a Feminist Poetics”). In her essays, Showalter articulated the need to examine women's literature through the lens of women's experiences, exploring themes of identity and sexuality. She warned that “Feminist criticism cannot go around forever in mens’ ill-fitting hand-me-downs, the Annie Hall of English Studies” (“Towards a Feminist Poetics”). Showalter advanced this theory further in “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” an essay published in 1981 in Critical Inquiry, in which she challenged the academy to focus on women’s writing outside of traditional theoretical frameworks constructed by men.

In the 1980s, Showalter edited The New Feminist Criticism, and in 1985 she published The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980, in which she mapped a cultural history of women's mental health, arguing that societal attitudes toward women and madness were deeply intertwined. She traced how women were often pathologized and how these narratives reflected broader societal fears about female autonomy. By analyzing the historical treatment of women labeled as “mad,” Showalter highlighted the intersection of gender, power, and mental health. This work received some critical pushback, but ultimately its connections between gender-related illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War syndrome, recovered memory, and multiple personality syndrome emphasized the need for a feminist understanding of mental health. 

In 2001, Showalter published Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage, in which she looked at feminist intellectuals from the eighteenth century to the contemporary period. She also brought stories of her more personal experiences as a feminist intellectual into the theoretical text. In this work, she emphasized the importance of recognizing the diverse voices within feminist discourse, arguing that understanding this heritage is crucial for contemporary feminist scholars. Showalter published Teaching Literature in 2003; in 2009, she published A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, an encyclopedic project covering 250 female authors over 350 years of writing. Many view Jury as a partner text to A Literature of Their Own because it introduced the world of American women writers the same way her earlier book inaugurated a world of British women writers. In 2016 Showalter published The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe, a biography of the nineteenth-century woman writer whose verse “Battle Hymn of the Republic” had been widely sung but whose life had been largely unknown. 

Showalter’s first involvement in the feminist movement occurred in 1968, while she was living in Paris for the summer and experienced the start of the French women’s liberation movement. When she returned to Princeton, she noticed that The National Organization for Women (NOW) was beginning to organize and she became involved, eventually becoming the president of the Princeton chapter.

While at Douglass College, Showalter also wrote a proposal encouraging the institution to remain a women’s college that would include courses on women, a women’s studies program, and even a day-care center, along with career advising and opportunities for older female students. The university supported the proposal, and as a result, “Douglass became an international center for scholarship, innovation, and support for women students. When it decided to merge with the university, it negotiated from a position of strength, protected its programs, and expanded research, teaching, counselling, and leadership training for women” (VFA 2020).

Throughout her career spanning over five decades, Elaine Showalter fundamentally transformed feminist literary criticism. Her concepts of gynocriticism and female literary tradition remain foundational to feminist literary studies today. By combining scholarly innovation with feminist activism, Showalter’s career demonstrates a scholar's profound impact in transforming academic discourse, recovering marginalized voices, and creating theoretical frameworks that inspire new generations of feminist critics and scholars.

A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.

The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.

The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory (editor). New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.

Modern American Women Writers (editor; with Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz). New York: Scribner, 1991.

Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Scribbling Women: Short Stories by Nineteenth-Century American Women (editor). New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1997.

Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage. New York: Scribner, 2001.

Teaching Literature. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.