Phyllis Rose is a professor of English at Wesleyan University. She received her bachelor's degree from Radcliffe, her master's from Yale, and her doctorate from Harvard. She taught briefly at both Harvard and Yale before coming to Wesleyan in 1969, and has also been a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley. The author lives in Middletown, Connecticut, with her son, Teddy. Her first book, Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf, was nominated for the 1978 National Book Award.