Nina Auerbach, University of Pennsylvania
Vol. 24, No. 2 (Fall 2005), 265-268.

Undaunted by mystery, this essay cross-examines two of Heilbrun’s best known Amanda Cross novels, Poetic Justice (1970) and Death in a Tenured Position (1981), and offers an unflinching critique of the mentorships disclosed by these novels. In Poetic Justice, the University College, which is dedicated to providing education for older, less wealthy students, including many women, is threatened by the main campus, which woos the laziest preppies. Within university corporate economics, the patronage system has remained entrenched, and this system both deadens the patronized and kills off the patrons in a never-ending petrifying reproduction of itself. Thus Heilbrun’s later, bleaker novel dwells upon the humiliation of isolated, fictional Professor Janet Mandelbaum, whose suicide is not a triumph of choice but a grotesque defeat. In focusing on such humiliation, this essay argues, Heilbrun missed what mattered, namely, exploitation, a snare Amanda Cross never explored. What these novels inadvertently disclose about the vicious core of academia is the murder within the patronage system. The presence of women has brought none of the healing or altered rituals that Heilbrun imagined, but rather a perpetuation of the loneliness of tenured women, including Heilbrun, and a perpetuation of the inequities and exploitations inherent in patronage—the murder or suicide produced by mentoring.

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

Susan Kress, Skidmore College
Vol. 24, No. 2 (Fall 2005), 257-264.

This essay takes on the form of a mock biography of Carolyn Heilbrun’s protagonist Kate Fansler, focusing on the gaps in her life. In order to do this, the essay examines Heilbrun’s nonfictional books Writing a Woman’s Life (1988) and The Last Gift of Time (1997), her novels No Word from Winifred (1986) and Sweet Death, Kind Death (1984), and her short stories “Tania’s Nowhere,” “The Disappearance of Great Aunt Flavia,” and “Murder Without a Text,” for clues to the disappearing and invisible women in Heilbrun’s fiction and to Heilbrun herself. This essay returns in particular to work written around 1986 when Heilbrun turned sixty, began to speak of herself as old, and publicly plotted her suicide, which she set for ten years later at age seventy (a date she did not keep because she found life still compelling). This paper also takes the lead in setting aside Heilbrun’s dismissals of dreams and the unconscious. Instead, it seeks traces not only of the mysterious life of Kate Fansler, but also of the life Heilbrun led at a level far below consciousness. Focusing on “Tania’s Nowhere,” this essay teases out several conclusions about Kate’s life and Heilbrun’s death.

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

Sandra M. Gilbert, University of California, Davis
Vol. 24, No. 2 (Fall 2005), 247-255.

This essay pursues women writers’ often fatal attraction to death. From Emily Dickinson to Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, women poets have often imagined death as multiply and richly seductive. This essay outlines four general types of textual representation of suicide, naming these the “erotic,” “sacrificial,” “self-loathing,” and “mimetic” or “competitive.” These classifications necessarily also intertwine, thickening the seductive suicidal net. This paper moves from poetry’s persistent Charon, the “supple suitor,” to the current social struggle over assisted suicide, to which women are far more likely than men to fall victim. In the framework of the suicide plot this essay outlines, such a choice seems not much more than an accession to cultural proscriptions, which lurk beneath apparently rational choices. While choice has, for feminists, nearly invariably positive associations, revolutionary suicide may be nothing more than that old bug bear, the slippery slope. Against such a choice, this essay counsels readers to look at the work of disabled activists on the “Not Dead Yet” website and advises us to consider the sorrow so many suicides leave behind.

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

Sara Paretsky
Vol. 24, No. 2 (Fall 2005), 241-245.

In this personal essay, the author shares something of her own story as a writer and the impact that Heilbrun’s pseudonymous detective writer, Amanda Cross, had on her vocation. The message the author received as a young girl growing up in a small town was “ladies don’t do this”—with “this” running the gamut from driving pickup trucks to working outside the home as anything but a secretary or a schoolteacher to studying math and physics. To escape her restlessness and anger, this essay’s author dove into detective fiction during her teens, but when, at twenty, Amanda Cross entered her life, she felt as though she’d been thumped between the shoulders with a large stick: “a woman who did what Peter Wimsey did, who strolled urbanely through the upper reaches of society, who confronted power without fear, who used her wits to confound both police and academy—she was what I had been waiting for, not a romantic hero.” The essay also tells the story of how the sixties seemed a decade in which women could at last reclaim their lives. Now more than ever, this essay argues, we need to remember the courage of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who spent seventy years working for our right to vote. As feminists commemorating Carolyn Heilbrun’s work, this essay urges us to carry it on.

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

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.