Cynthia Griffin Wolff

Cynthia Griffin Wolff (née Griffin; born August 20, 1936) is an American literary historian and editor known for her biographies of Edith Wharton and Emily Dickinson. She has served as Class of 1922 Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Biography
Cynthia Griffin Wolff was born on August 20, 1936, in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of Sears executive James T. Griffin. She studied at Hathaway Brown School and Radcliffe College (where she obtained a BA in 1958). Wolff later moved to Harvard University, where, in addition to studying at Harvard Medical School, she obtained a PhD in English; her dissertation was titled The Puritan Sources of Richardson's Psychological Realism.

Wolff worked as an assistant professor at Manhattanville College and later at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, before being promoted by the latter to professor in 1976. While working at UM Amherst, she published two books: Samuel Richardson (1972) and A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton (1977).

In 1980, Wolff moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she became Class of 1922 Professor of Humanities in 1985. In 1984, Wolff received an American Council of Learned Societies Grant-In-Aid for a project called "The life of Emily Dickinson". In 1986, Wolff published Emily Dickinson, a biography of Emily Dickinson. In 1997, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Wolff retired in 2003.

Wolff has also edited at least four books: Other Lives (1973), Classic American Women Writers (1980), The House of Mirth (1985), and Four Stories by American Women (1990).

Wolff was married to political philosopher Robert Paul Wolff from 1962 until their divorce in 1986; she married Nicholas J. White in 1988. She is the mother of chess grandmaster Patrick Wolff and legal scholar and LGBT activist Tobias Barrington Wolff.

As editor

 * Other Lives (1973)
 * Classic American Women Writers (1980)
 * The House of Mirth (1985, by Edith Wharton)
 * Four Stories by American Women (1990)