From Albrecht Strauss, Sharon Gilbert's professor at UNC:

CONCERNING SHARON GILBERT

Yes, Sharon Gilbert was a remarkable person. As so many in this moving memorial have testified, she was warm-hearted, understanding, gifted, enthusiastic -- a loving and widely beloved woman. What impressed me as much as anything about her, though, was her determination. As her dissertation director at the University of North Carolina, I saw Sharon pick up a study of James Boswell's journals a great many years after having dropped it, plunge into her pioneering critical analysis (having been lost for well over a century, these journals had only recently been recovered) with insight and relish, and wind up with an original, incisive, and beautifully written doctoral dissertation. It took extraordinary courage and will power to return to a seemingly abandoned task after so prolonged an interruption and to bring it to a dazzling conclusion. If ever there was awoman of valor . . .