KROOK (Gilead), DOROTHEA

KROOK (Gilead ), DOROTHEA (1920–1989), English literary scholar. Krook was born in Riga, Latvia, but immigrated to South Africa with her parents in 1928. After graduating in English literature at Cape Town University, she attended Newnham College, Cambridge, and spent 14 years in Cambridge as a lecturer. Her most famous student was Sylvia Plath, the iconic American-born poet; Plath regarded Krook as one of her most significant role models. In 1960 Krook immigrated to Israel, where she taught at the Hebrew University and was appointed associate professor in 1963. In 1971, she was appointed full professor of English literature at Tel Aviv University. Krook is the author of The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (1962), and she is regarded as an authority on the author. In 1969, she published The Elements of Tragedy (Hebrew ed. translated by A. Yavin, 1971), in which she portrays the Aristotelian vision of tragedy which she traces in the works of Ibsen and Chekhov, and it is particularly for this work that she was awarded the Israel Prize in 1973, and in 1974 was elected a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Krook wrote an essay-length introduction to the first Hebrew translation of The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (Diyuknah shel Geveret, Mosad Bialik, 1978), entitled "El P'nei Goral Savukh" ("Facing a Complex Fate"). Her "Recollections of Sylvia Plath" appeared in Edward Butscher (ed.), Sylvia Plath: The Woman and Her Work (1977). In 1968 she married the Hebrew poet Zerubavel *Gilead, and was a member of Kibbutz En-Ḥarod.