Henry VI Part II: Marilynne Robinson's First Big Reclamation Project

turns out you can just go online and read people's dissertations. do people know about this

Previous fifteen posts in this series on Marilynne Robinson and Annie Dillard, super duper genius writers.

We’ve been talking about Annie for a few posts now. What’s Marilynne been up to?

In 1967 she marries Fred Miller Robinson, now a well-regarded academic who writes on the theory of comedy. I will probably glance at his work at some point for this project. It’s hard to learn much about the Robinsons’ marriage, which ended — at least formally — in 1989, for the very good reason that neither of them seem to talk much about the other publicly. Good for them. The respectful student of Marilynne Robinson’s work should probably resist curiosity and follow suit. That’s why I will only be glancing at his work. (Besides academic bios and reviews of his books, the only thing I find about him is this testimony that the man was a decent writing teacher, at least to one novelist. Also, it would appear that, whatever they did or didn’t share, Robinson and Robinson at least shared an interest in Wallace Stevens.)

The couple have two children, one of them during her time at University of Washington-Seattle. Robinson dedicates some of her work to them, writes Housekeeping while they play and sleep, speaks warmly and affectionately about them in interviews.

I talk about all this because, other than “grad school,” there isn’t a lot of information with which to answer the question “What was Marilynne Robinson up to in the 1970s?” When we talk about her family, we at least we have a name for what we don’t know. In my research on the writer Marguerite Young, I also came across this fascinating and hard-to-verify tidbit, from a 2009 issue of the academic journal femspec, by the journal’s editor, Batya Weinbaum: