Born on November 1, 1925, as the only child of a merchant (regional manager of a chocolate firm) and a schoolteacher in Breslau (Wrocław), Silesia, Edelgard Else Renate Conradt would have studied at the university of that city in order to become a music teacher, if the Second World War had not ended this plan. Instead, after her expulsion to North Germany, she earned a teaching certificate for elementary school at the Kant Academy in Braunschweig and enrolled later at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau in order to study foreign languages, French above all, her favorite idiom. She benefited from the lectures of Hugo Friedrich (French literature), Friedrich Schürr (Linguistics), and Hermann Heuer (English literature), thanks to various stipends from 1949 to 1951.

A U.S. Government scholarship allowed for one year at Michigan State College in East Lansing, Michigan (1951–52). She emigrated in 1953 and became a long-distance operator at Michigan Bell Telephone Company in Ann Arbor, while taking graduate courses at the University of Michigan. Soon hired as a teaching fellow, she continued her studies in order to earn a Master's degree (1955) and a Ph.D. (1962). She realized that scholarly writing afforded great pleasure, and her first articles were written in graduate school. Her marriage to Alfred DuBruck brought contacts with nineteenth-c. French literature; a move to Kalamazoo, Michigan, where Al taught at Kalamazoo College; and a son, Al II, who is now married and teaches music at Covington School in Birmingham, Michigan.