Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan to a white mother and African American father, whose marriage was illegal in seventeen states when they married. They moved with their two daughters just before Gretchen turned five to Springfield, Massachusetts, where she grew up, always knowing that she wanted to be a writer. She read her way through the Oz, Little Maid, and Book House series in her home, while also tackling the public library which refused to let her have an adult library card until her mother intervened.
Expecting to be a novelist—something to which she still aspires—she began instead to write lives. (“Why invent when there are so many true stories to tell?” she says.) Her first book, Carrington, is the only biography of the Bloomsbury Group figure Dora Carrington. Her second book, Black London (published in the UK as Black England), told the true story of black people in eighteenth-century Britain, and was a New York Times “notable book.” She followed this with an edited book, Black Victorians/Black Victoriana. She has published three books on Frances Hodgson Burnett: a biography, Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of The Secret Garden, the Norton Critical Edition of The Secret Garden, and The Annotated Secret Garden, a lushly-illustrated and annotated edition of the perennial favorite.
Her latest book, Mr. and Mrs. Prince, is a labor of love, jointly researched with her husband, Anthony Gerzina, whom she met when they were both students at Marlboro College in Marlboro, Vermont. Lucy Terry, the first known African American poet, and her husband Abijah Prince, were landowners and former slaves who lived two hundred years earlier in the same village in Vermont as the Gerzinas, and have gone down in legend as remarkable people who fought for their rights in the courts. It completely changes the notions about slavery in the North. Writing and researching this remarkable story was a life-changing event for both Gretchen and Anthony.
Gerzina has a B.A. from Marlboro College, an M.A. from Simmons College, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. She has been a tenured professor at Vassar College and at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is now the Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor in Biography at Dartmouth College, where she is the first woman ever to chair the English department, and the first African American woman to chair an Ivy League English department. She is also Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Exeter in Devon, England. She teaches courses on the novel, Victorian literature, African American literature, Black British literature, and biography. She has held two fellowships from the National Endowment for Humanities, been Fulbright Distinguished Scholar to Great Britain, and has been selected by the Rhodes Trust and Oxford University to be the George Eastman Visiting Professor to Oxford in 2009-10, and a fellow at Balliol College.
In the media, Gerzina is the host of the nationally-syndicated program “The Book Show,” on which she interviews every week some of the finest writers working today. She has appeared frequently on British television and radio documentaries.
She and Anthony live in an eighteenth-century Vermont farmhouse with two red barns and three black cats. (In the past, they have lived in Massachusetts, Canada, California, England and New York.) They have two grown sons, Simon and Daniel, who live in New York and Chicago, and they greeted the arrival of their first grandchild, Miles McBride Gerzina, in June 2008.
Gretchen recently completed a one-year residency in England as Eastman Professor to Balliol College at Oxford University. Read more about her experience there.