My friend Cora Kaplan, who has died aged 84, was a feminist trailblazer in the field of literary and cultural studies. Her 1975 critical anthology of women’s poetry, Salt and Bitter and Good: Three Centuries of English and American Women Poets, was one of the first of its kind, and her collected essays, Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism (1986), played a key role in ushering feminist readings of fiction, poetry, and popular culture into the mainstream of literary studies.
In her 2007 book Victoriana, she reappropriated the term to demonstrate how 19th-century values and voices were seeping into the cultural and political atmosphere. Her prolific work as an editor included Imagining British Slavery with John Oldfield (2009), and the 10-volume series The History of British Women’s Writing, with Jennie Batchelor (2010-18).
