Laird, Holly A. 1953–

PERSONAL: Born 1953. Education: Princeton University, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES: Office—University of Tulsa, Zink Hall 344, Tulsa, OK 74104. Agent—c/o Author Mail, University of Illinois Press, 1325 South Oak St., Champaign, IL 61820-6903. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: University of Tulsa, Tulsa, OK, professor of English and chair of English department.

MEMBER: Council of Editors of Learned Journals (president, 1996–97).

AWARDS, HONORS: Award for Outstanding Academic Book, Choice magazine, 1988–89, for Self and Sequence: The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence.

WRITINGS:

Self and Sequence: The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence, University Press of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA), 1988.

Women Coauthors, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 2000.

Editor, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature.

SIDELIGHTS: In Self and Sequence: The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence, Holly A. Laird focuses on the importance early twentieth-century British author D. H. Lawrence placed on the order of his poetry. "She raises textual interest to the level of critical insight when she examines how this concern for sequencing poems connects with Lawrence's narrative impulse," reported Christopher Pollnitz in the Review of English Studies. Pollnitz noted that when Laird "investigates how Lawrence, while never abandoning the coherence of narrative logic or internal monologue in his verse, was recurrently tempted beyond these to techniques of symbolist association and verbal fragmentation, she does fascinate: she adds to the picture of Lawrence as a post-Victorian and Modernist." L. D. Clark, a contributor to the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, recommended the book as "an original and carefully wrought work of scholarship, essential reading for anyone who seeks a deeper knowledge of Lawrence's poetry."

In Women Coauthors Laird explores writing partnerships formed by women in the Victorian era and the twentieth century—a field that has been mostly ignored in literary criticism. Books that do examine literary partnerships often focus on deciphering which author wrote which part of the collaborative effort, but Laird instead looks at the writing team as an entity unto itself. According to George E. Haggerty in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, this approach "leads not only to sensitive readings of a wide range of individual works and the terms of their construction but also to a theory of collaboration that is rich and complex enough to deal with such disparate writers as John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, Edith Somerville and [Ms.] Martin Ross, Linda Brent, and many others." The writing partnership of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas is discussed, as are those of Michael Field and the poet H.D., and Louise Erdrich and her late husband Michael Dorris. Haggerty concluded: "I think Holly Laird has offered a theory of collaboration that will change our understanding of authorship for good."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Choice, November, 1988, J. Hafley, review of Self and Sequence: The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence, p. 490; December, 2000, review of Women Coauthors, p. 707.

International Fiction Review, January, 2003, Jennifer Andrews, review of Women Coauthors, p. 105.

Journal of English and Germanic Philology, April, 1990, L. D. Clark, review of Self and Sequence, p. 253.

Modern Fiction Studies, winter, 2001, review of Women Coauthors, p. 1068.

Review of English Studies, August, 1990, Christopher Pollnitz, review of Self and Sequence, p. 419.

Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, fall, 2001, George E. Haggerty, review of Women Coauthors, p. 298.

Virginia Quarterly Review, summer, 1989, Jeffrey Meyers, review of Self and Sequence, p. 555.