Diane Middlebrook, a leading feminist scholar known for her acclaimed biographies of poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, passed away on Saturday at the age of 68.

According to officials at Stanford University, where she taught literature for 35 years and helped launch feminist studies, Middlebrook died of cancer in San Francisco. She left Stanford in 2002 to focus on writing full time.

She was born in Idaho in 1939, grew up in Spokane, Washington, graduated from the University of Washington, Seattle in 1961 and earned her doctorate at Yale University in 1968. She was among the first women to teach literature in Stanford’s English department. In 1985, she married Carl Djerassi, an emeritus professor of chemistry at Stanford University, the inventor of birth control pill and later a writer himself.

She became famous for her 1991 best-seller “Anne Sexton: A Biography,” which was nominated for the National Book Award and “Her Husband: Ted Hughes & Sylvia Plath, A Marriage,” a best-seller published in 2003 about the tumultuous marriage of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

Middlebrook also wrote “Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton,” a biography appeared in 1998 about a female jazz musician who lived as a man. People will remember her in 2008 also, as her biography about the Roman poet Ovid is expected to be published next year as a tribute to him on his 2000th anniversary since his birth.

"I think her legacy as a biographer is her incredible humanity. She never sacrificed humanity in maintaining an acute critical recognition of her subject,” said author Kate Moses, one of many writers and artists encouraged by Middlebrook, according to the Associated Press.

Besides teaching and writing, Middlebrook was famous for her literary salons organized in Bay Area to encourage women writers. Together with her husband, she led the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside.

She was awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, Stanford Humanities Center, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Study Center of Bellagio.

Middlebrook is survived by her daughter, two sister, stepson, step grandson and husband, who was too aggrieved by the loss of his wife to give any comment when reached at his home in San Francisco on Saturday.

A memorial for Ms. Middlebrook’s friends and colleagues has been announced at 2 p.m. Sunday, January 27 at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, but with no flowers and gifts, the family asked.