Deborah Dee Rogers was born in Massachusetts in 1953[1] to Marvin and Marilyn Rogers.[2] She had two brothers.[3] The family moved to Wayne, New Jersey, in 1966.[3] Her father worked in the pharmaceutical industry, eventually becoming a director at American Cyanamid Company.[4]
In 1988, she married Howard Segal, a professor of history also at the University of Maine. She kept her maiden name,[4] and they had two children with Segal's last name.[2] Segal died in 2020, and Rogers assisted in completing his last posthumous publication, Becoming Modern: The University of Maine, 1965–2015 (2023), a collection of essays he was editing with Ann Acheson.[5]
Writing
Rogers's first monograph, Bookseller as Rogue: John Almon and the Politics of Eighteenth-Century Publishing was published in 1986 to mixed reviews.[6][7][8] This book presents the writer and publisher John Almon as a "rogue" for his opportunistic business decisions, and uses his career as an example of how politics affected booksellers in the period.[6] Reviewers praised her identification of two new manuscript archives with material related to Almon, and the book's bibliography of his publications.[6][7] However, they found the book's analysis of these materials lacking, particularly criticizing the omission of Almon's bookselling activities,[7] and Rogers's casual tone.[8]
Her next two books focused on the eighteenth-century Gothic writer Ann Radcliffe. Her book The Critical Response to Ann Radcliffe (1994) collected and examined commentary about Radcliffe, including reviews, scholarly articles, and personal letters.[9][10] It was published while Radcliffe was experiencing a revitalization of scholarly interest, and provides source material demonstrating her mixed and frequently-changing reputation since the eighteenth century.[10] Rogers' third scholarly book, Ann Radcliffe: A Bio-Bibliography (1996), includes bibliographic information about every work published by or about Radcliffe from 1789 to 1995,[11][12] including imitations, adaptations, parodies, and works spuriously attributed to Radcliffe.[13] It also presents the first biography of Radcliffe to include information from her commonplace book, which had previously been ignored.[11][14] Many previous biographies debated sensationalist rumors that Radcliffe had been driven to madness and death by her Gothic writing, without seeking documentary evidence.[14][15] Rogers instead uses Radcliffe's commonplace book to describe the details of Radcliffe's treatment for asthma and digestive problems in the last years of her life.[16]
Henry Fuseli's painting The Nightmare (1781) was on the cover of Two Gothic Classics by Women, edited by Rogers
Rogers's fourth monograph, titled The Matrophobic Gothic and Its Legacy: Sacrificing Mothers in the Novel and in Popular Culture, was published in 2007.[19] It includes chapters on Radcliffe's critical reception and commonplace book, Northanger Abbey, and Rob Roy, which she discussed in her previous works.[20] It also includes a chapter on Pamela (1740) by Samuel Richardson, a chapter on the medical complications of childbirth described in midwife manuals, and a section on modern television soap operas.[20] The book defines matrophobia as the "fear of mothers," "fear of becoming a mother," and "fear of identification with and separation from the maternal body", and argues that patriarchal culture causes women's relationships with each other to be driven by a metaphorical matrophobia.[20] Rogers particularly criticizes anti-maternalism in feminist and psychoanalytic theorists.[20] The final section on soap operas argues that the fragmented narrative structure of daytime television also reinforces patriarchal values.[20]
Bibliography
Monographs
Bookseller as Rogue: John Almon and the Politics of Eighteenth-Century Publishing. New York: Peter Lang, 1986.
The Critical Response to Ann Radcliffe. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1994.
Ann Radcliffe: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1996.
The Matrophobic Gothic and Its Legacy: Sacrificing Mothers in the Novel and in Popular Culture. New York: Peter Lang, 2007.
Edited works
Rob Roy. New York: Signet Classics, 1995.
Two Gothic Classics by Women. New York: Signet Classics, 1995.
(with Howard Segal and Ann Acheson) Becoming Modern: The University of Maine, 1965–2015. Orono, Maine: University of Maine Press, 2023.
↑ Meeker, R. B. (1996). "Ann Radcliffe: A Bio-Bibliography. (Brief Article)". Choice: Publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries, A Division of the American Library Association. 34 (1): 106.
↑ Rogers, Deborah D. (1996). Ann Radcliffe: A Bio-Bibliography. Greenwood Press. pp.viii. ISBN9780313283796.
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