Irene Tayler

Irene Tayler is a feminist literary scholar who works predominantly on Romantic and Victorian literature and contemporary art. Her scholarship is marked by her interest in visual art, gender, and the relationship of life and art. Her major publications have focused on the Romantic poet and artist William Blake, the writers Emily and Charlotte Brontë, and the Surrealist painter and Holocaust survivor, Samuel Bak. Tayler’s work on Blake in the 1970s helped to bring renewed attention to his designs and to further feminist analysis of his life and work. Her work on the Brontës in the 1990s furthered feminist and psychoanalytic readings of the writers. Her work on Bak in the 2000s was done in conjunction with the artist, and it highlights her concerns with Jewish history and identity as well as contemporary painting. Tayler was an important figure in bringing the insights and concerns of Second Wave feminism to studies of Romantic and Victorian literature. In 1983, Tayler offered the citation when her fellow Romanticist, Aileen Ward, was accorded the Distinguished Scholar Award by the Keats-Shelley Association of America. In 1996 Tayler served on the organizing committee for the 1996 North American Society for the Study of Romanticism conference, and she chaired the session “Writing Across Gender Lines.” In the twenty-first century, Tayler turned to editing catalogues of the Surrealist painter and Holocaust survivor Samuel Bak. Bak’s paintings are laden with Jewish iconography expressed in a Surrealist manner, and Tayler’s essays on Bak highlight his probing of Jewish identity in a post-Holocaust world. Professionally, Tayler completed her PhD at Stanford University in 1967. As a professor, she worked at Columbia University, City College, CUNY, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), from which she retired in 1997. Tayler was referenced in contemporary journalistic accounts of the 1992 suit brought by Cynthia Wolf against Daniel Happerin, where Tayler is cited as saying that she was not allowed to teach in MIT’s Women’s Studies program. In 1986, she and her husband, Saul Touster, dedicated sixty-one acres of land to the Halfway Pond Conservation Area in Plymouth, Massachusetts.