One might term Gordon S. Haight an "archival" biographer of women writers of the nineteenth century. He combined massive erudition with literary grace, indefatigable scholarship with a historian's sense of the outer world of the nineteenth century that frames the inner world of the artist.

Born on 6 February 1901 in Muskegon, Michigan, to Louis Pease and Grace Carpenter Haight, Gordon Sherman Haight received his B.A. degree from Yale University in 1923. The main influences on his development as a scholar were Professor Chauncey Brewster Tinker, who acted as Haight's mentor during his undergraduate days and assembled much of the George Eliot manuscript collection at Yale, and Professor Robert James Menner, his first instructor at Yale, who initiated his interest in Eliot.

Haight began his academic career as master in English at the prestigious Kent School in Kent, Connecticut, in 1924, moving in 1925 to the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut. He...