Mary Wilson Carpenter

I first met Eve as a member of the George Eliot reading group, but I dropped out because I mistakenly thought I didn’t have enough time to do that and also finish my dissertation on George Eliot. But a while later Eve, with her usual generosity, invited me back in. By that time the group was no longer a GE reading group but a feminist collective. When I published my first book (George Eliot and the Landscape of Time) in 1986, I wrote in the acknowledgments that “a group known as ID 450 has greatly fostered my involvement not only with GE but with women’s writing ‘in the plural.’” By the time I finished my second book (Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies: Women, Sexuality and Religion in the Victorian Market) in 2003, I had known Eve long enough and well enough to say that “Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s brilliant work has undoubtedly been the single most important scholarly influence on my work, and her equally extraordinary personal generosity has opened doors for me–as for many others–time and again.” And I then thanked the current members of ID 450 “whose warm friendship and intellectual companionship has uniquely enriched my writing and my life.” Now retired from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, I’ve lost Eve but not her work, and I hope I can go on enriching my writing and my life with the amazing sisterhood of ID 450 for a long, long time.