Christine Froula, Northwestern University
Vol. 24, No. 2 (Fall 2005), 231-240.

Set in the Tuscan-gardenlike heaven for lovers of reading that Virginia Woolf evokes in “How Should One Read a Book,” this one-act play in honor of pioneering American feminist critic Carolyn Heilbrun—also known as the mystery writer Amanda Cross—takes form as a Dantesque dream vision. Woolf’s Septimus Warren Smith conducts Heilbrun/Cross’s fictional professor-detective, Kate Fansler, from her New York apartment, where she mourns Carolyn’s suicide, to this circle of heaven. Here an array of historical and fictional characters converse about life and death: Septimus, the Great War veteran of Mrs Dalloway (1925); Woolf’s family friend Kitty Lushington Maxse (1867-1922), Clarissa Dalloway’s inspiration; Judith Shakespeare, William’s not impossible genius-sister, whose aspiring life and death Woolf narrates in her path-breaking A Room of One’s Own (1929); Percy Bysshe Shelley, English Romantic poet and radical thinker, whose death-embracing elegy for Keats Kitty/Clarissa knows by heart; Cleopatra VII, Queen of Egypt, whose noble suicide culminates Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra; and Woolf, who, having “done my share, with pen & talk, for the human race,” took her life during the Blitz. Besides a love of reading, these dramatis personae have in common the fact that they have all fought death and been vanquished.

This article is part of a special issue of personal and scholarly reflections on the life of Carolyn Heilbrun.