Susan Taubes (1928–1969) was the daughter of a psychoanalyst and the granddaughter of a rabbi. She and her father emigrated to the United States from Hungary in 1939. She attended Bryn Mawr before studying philosophy and religion in Jerusalem, at the Sorbonne, and at Radcliffe, where she wrote her dissertation on Simone Weil. She and her husband, Jacob Taubes, had a son and a daughter. In 1960 she began teaching at Columbia University. She edited volumes of Native American and African folktales; published a dozen short stories; and wrote two novels, Divorcing and Lament for Julia, available and forthcoming as NYRB Classics. Her suicide came shortly after the publication of Divorcing, in November 1969.
Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting (2020) and has written for the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Paris Review, The New York Times, and other publications. She is a 2022–23 fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, where she is working on a book about Gertrude Stein.
