Rosemarie Bodenheimer

During her career as an English professor, Rosemarie Bodenheimer specialized in Victorian and Modern novels and autobiographies. Fascinated by the links between a writer's letters and fiction, she developed a form of textual biographical criticism in books about George Eliot and Charles Dickens. At retirement, she explored an unusual archive of family letters and journals that led to a book about her parents and grandparents, who fled Hitler's Germany in the early 1930s to build new lives in...See more

During her career as an English professor, Rosemarie Bodenheimer specialized in Victorian and Modern novels and autobiographies. Fascinated by the links between a writer's letters and fiction, she developed a form of textual biographical criticism in books about George Eliot and Charles Dickens. At retirement, she explored an unusual archive of family letters and journals that led to a book about her parents and grandparents, who fled Hitler's Germany in the early 1930s to build new lives in the United States. Mendelssohn & Co. continues her practice of weaving stories from letters, biography and history, and extends her focus on German Jewish lives back into the 19th century. Attempting to bring the Mendelssohn family dynamics to life, she took a new turn into biographical fiction, and drew on her experience as an amateur cellist and chamber musician. See less