Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (1926–2003,) pseudonym Amanda Cross, was an American feminist scholar, literary critic, and author. This “mother of academic feminism” was also a much-loved writer of erudite detective stories.
Born in East Orange, New Jersey, Heilbrun attended Wellesley College and Columbia University and taught at Columbia, 1960–92. Among her scholarly works are The Garnett Family (1961,) Christopher Isherwood (1970,) and The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem (1995.) As a feminist thinker and activist, she had not only produced such pioneering studies as Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (1973,) Reinventing Womanhood (1979,) and Writing a Woman’s Life (1988.) Hamlet’s Mother and Other Women (1990) is a collection of her feminist literary essays.
Heilbrun was the author of the ‘Amanda Cross’ mysteries, which feature smart and feisty heroine Kate Fansler, a professor of literature and an amateur detective, and are typically set in academic surroundings. Popular Amanda Cross mysteries include In the Last Analysis (1964,) Poetic Justice (1970,) The Theban Mysteries (1971,) A Trap for Fools (1989,) Honest Doubt (2000,) and The Edge of Doom (2002.)
Heilbrun’s The Last Gift of Time: Life beyond Sixty (1997) discussed how she came to reject a “determination” she had made years earlier to commit suicide at age 70. When Heilbrun took her own life at age 77, her son Robert commented in her obituary in the New York Times, “She wanted to control her destiny; she felt her life was a journey that had concluded.”
Heilbrun’s autobiography is Writing a Woman’s Life (1988.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Carolyn Gold Heilbrun
The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.
—Carolyn Gold Heilbrun
Topics: Marriage
Ideas move rapidly when their time comes.
—Carolyn Gold Heilbrun
Topics: Ideas
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