Margot Peters. In Memoriam

Several local media report the death of Margot Peters (1933-2022), writer, scholar, biographer, and teacher of English, linguistics, and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

In 1973 she published Charlotte Brontë: Style in the Novel (University of Wisconsin Press), a mainly linguistic analysis of Charlotte Brontë's prose where she painstakingly analysed formal structures, punctuation, adverbs... As J.M.S. Tompkins highlighted in his review for The Review of English Studies New Series (Vol. 25, No. 99 (Aug., 1974), pp. 359-361), she tried to pinpoint the reason behind Charlotte's prose power:

When a reader is brought up short five of six times per page by finding words where he least expected them, the result must be a sense of disquiet.

Two years later, in 1975, she published a biography of Charlotte: Unquiet Soul (Doubleday, 1975). The book was widely praised by the likes of C.J. Snow, Margaret Drabble, Irving Stone, although some reviewers (ie. Helene Moglen, who also published her own biography in 1976, in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Sep., 1976), pp. 222-225) found the book not very rigorous and too simplistic:

Equally misleading, and perhaps more serious, is Peters' general refusal to distinguish between the art and the life: her tendency to employ material from the novels and juvenilia as if it were factual biographical evidence. (...)

A simplistic psychological approach permits this impressionistic treatment of "real people" and fictional characters. Peters does not venture beneath the surface of her subjects' psyches any more than she has to. 

Katherine Frank in The Brontë Biographies: Romance, Reality, and Revision (Biography, Volume 2, Number 2, Spring 1979, pp. 141-156), gave Margot Peters's book its significance and context:

Margot Peters' Unquiet Soul (1975) succeeds where Moglen fails because Peters recognizes both the feminist, pyschosexual implications of Charlotte's fate and the very personal, unique elements of her life. Peters, indeed, is the tme descendent of Mrs. Gaskell, retaining her predecessor's affection and understanding for her subject while using the insights to be gained from reassessing Charlotte's life from a modern point of view.

This feminist approach was the real angle in which her biography should be taken into account, according to Margot Peters herself as she wrote in the Introduction:

Charlotte Brontë's life and art were both an eloquent protest against the cruel and frustrating limitations imposed upon women and a triumph over them. Seen from this angle, the facts of her life fall into a new pattern, and it is this pattern that these pages propose to explore.