She is married and has three children.

She was a pioneer in the field of women's studies, teaching a class on "Women and Literature" in the early 1970s. In an attempt to provide students with an example of a successful female character in literature, she began assigning Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged for her class. This led her to write one of the earliest academic articles about Rand as a literary figure, "Ayn Rand and Feminism: An Unlikely Alliance", which was published