Rosemarie Bodenheimer spent her working life as Professor of English at Boston College, specializing in Victorian fiction. In The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction (1994) and Knowing Dickens (2007), she fashioned a form of biographical criticism that juxtaposes a writer's letters with published works. After retirement, she published a history of her German Jewish family's passage from Nazi Germany to the US, based on a large archive of family letters and other writings (2016). An experiment in biographical fiction followed, drawn from Mendelssohn family letters in 19th century Germany (2018).
