Brilliant. Brave. And a perfect picture of magnanimity.
These are the words I have always used to describe my friend and mentor, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. Now I write them in memory, with the mixture of grief and joy that comes with this privilege.
I first met Betsey in 1995, when I was doing graduate work in English at Emory University. I took her “Southern Women Writers,” the first of many seminars I would have with her. She was a historian by training, but in her teaching and scholarship, a humanities guru. Educated primarily at Harvard, her scholarly interests began with her investigations of the origins of physiocracy, and from there naturally expanded to the antebellum South, which was also her husband’s scholarly terrain. Her award-winning book Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South is a testament to the things that mattered most to her: impeccable, morally committed scholarship that endures. It also illustrates her lifelong commitment to the cause of feminism, which for Betsey was always about real justice for real women. Within the Plantation Household is a work of history, with all the usual trappings, but it is also a window into the lives of ordinary southern women, who are given the opportunity to speak for themselves. The book is perfect picture of Betsey’s convictions, for she always spoke for herself with courage, and encouraged countless other women to do so. Including me.
I remember timidly approaching her in the quad during a break, when she was smoking one of those dark cigarettes she loved (and later gave up). I asked her if she would direct my dissertation research; what I got was a broad smile and the beginning of a friendship. What I did not know until later was that it was a serendipitous time for both of us to meet. Make no mistake about it: while I hope I was an encouragement to her at an exciting but tumultuous time in her life, I know I got the much better end of the deal. She was an ideal mentor, the kind most graduate students can only dream about. She read my work carefully, and even line-edited it (she was a lucid and meticulous writer). She took me out to lunch more times than I can remember, which I would have appreciated even had I not been the bean-eating graduate student that I was. I have wonderful memories of dinners with her and her husband, Gene—along with other academic sorts—at their home in Atlanta. If you escaped being knocked over by their large dogs at the door, you were treated to a delicious meal. Betsey was an academic who could also cook, which says a lot about her. We often talked about nfl football. She even tried, at my request, to set me up with young men she respected. What I appreciated most was that under her care, I was neither a pet mind to indoctrinate nor a tool with which to fight other academics. She respected me and wanted me to succeed, to write about things that mattered to me, and to do so shrewdly—but also without fear.
I didn’t know at the time we met that she was nearing the final stage of her full reception into the Catholic church—and about to become the brunt of hostility occasioned by her conversion. I had entered Emory as a bit of a pariah myself: an evangelical studying American literature. But because of Betsey’s faithfulness,
I was able to work with a woman who not only respected my faith commitments—which she would have done even before her conversion—but also now fundamentally shared them. It was a privilege to sit in a graduate seminar on Flannery O’Connor with an accomplished scholar who was seeing these texts with new eyes herself.
Like O’Connor, Betsey thought of her faith as the natural outworking of intellectual honesty and a commitment to the truth. It is thus not surprising that in reflecting upon the arc of her life, a favorite passage of hers from another southern writer, Eudora Welty, came to my mind:
The events in our lives happen in a sequence of time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily—perhaps not possibly—chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.
I know that Betsey’s turn to the Catholic church was this kind of moment for her. In her essay “A Conversion Story,” appearing in First Things, she noted that many of her fellow academics were mystified by her faith journey. But for her there was continuity. Marxist theory—which she and her husband had earlier embraced—is, at its core, an ethical critique. She wrote that “over the years, my concerns about morality deepened, and my reflections invariably pointed to the apparently irrefutable conclusion that morality was, by its very nature, authoritarian. Morality, in other words, drew the dividing line between good and bad.” The academy had come to view morality in increasingly relativistic terms, and Betsey knew better. So she began to take very unpopular stands, such as believing that a woman can be, without contradiction, both pro-life and a feminist. Not only can be, but should be.
Betsey also found in the Catholic church a spiritual articulation of the very best parts of her scholarly vocation, to love and to serve others. She had already done that part well, but, fully committed to God, she began to do it with greater joy, even as she began to struggle more with her health. And against a world that measures value by accomplishment, she recognized that the most important legacy we can have as scholars and teachers is to see others as God sees them:
For if He loves us all, He also loves each of us. And recognition of that love imposes on us the obligation to love one another, asking no other reason than God’s injunction to do so […] knowing how little we merit His love, our best opening to the faith that He does lies not in the hope of being better than others, but in the security that His love encompasses even the least deserving among us.
I have tried to emulate Betsey’s style as a scholar and a teacher. But it is this core humility that I can only pray will characterize my life in the way that it has characterized hers.
Betsey, thank you. You will be missed.
Christina Bieber Lake is associate professor of English at Wheaton College. She is the author of The Incarnational Art of Flannery O’Connor (Mercer Univ. Press).
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