Ellen Moers (1928–1979[1]) was an American academic and literary scholar.
She is best known for her pioneering contribution to gynocriticism, Literary Women (1976).
[2] After two exact but conventional[citation needed] books (on the dandy and on Theodore Dreiser), Moers was caught up by Second-wave feminism, which she credits with "pulling me out of the stacks"[1] and leading her to write Literary Women.
In the latter she established the existence of a strong nineteenth-century tradition of (international) women writers—her identification within it of what she called 'female Gothic' proving especially influential.
[3] In the fast-moving world of feminist scholarship, her book would be challenged in the following decade as under-theorised and ethnocentric; but continued nonetheless to serve as a significant stepping-stone for future scholarship.