Title: United States Authors Series - Carolyn Heilbrun
Description: The titles of two of her best-known books, Reinventing Womanhood and Writing a Woman's Life, articulate the issues that have increasingly come to engage scholar and mystery writer Carolyn G. Heilbrun over the course of her nearly four-decade career: how important it is for women to script their own lives and how useful the study of women in literature can be in attaining this goal. In this first book-length study of Heilbrun's life and work, author Julia B.

Boken analyzes the myriad ways Heilbrun has devoted herself to the advancement of women - in life and in writing.

One of the less likely expressions of this devotion - that is, for a distinguished professor (since 1992 emerita) of literature at Columbia University - is Heilbrun's series of detective novels. In the eleven of these books that have appeared to date, Heilbrun, under the pseudonym Amanda Cross, draws from her academic background to create her own woman in literature: college professor/amateur detective Kate Fansler.

Boken nimbly and compellingly demonstrates how in the course of solving all kinds of mysteries - literary as well as criminal - this acutely intelligent and fiercely independent sleuth elucidates, even as she enacts, the social, cultural, and feminist concerns central to Heilbrun.

While Heilbrun's detective stories evidence the influence of her favorite mystery writer, Dorothy Sayers, Heilbrun's formidable collection of scholarly writings represents not only her early interest in feminism and feminist literary criticism but the enormous breadth and depth of her study of philosophy and English literature.

In works such as Toward a Recognition of Androgeny (1973) and Hamlet's Mother and Other Women (1990), Heilbrun scrutinizes the foundations of Western representations of gender, recasting figures as diverse as Shakespeare's Gertrude, Freud's Oedipus, and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway to win space for the writing of women.

And early works such as The Garnett Family (a 1961 study of a family of librarians, editors, and writers whose influence on English letters is renowned) and Christopher Isherwood (a 1971 study of the English author most celebrated for his stories of Hitler's Berlin) further attest to Heilbrun's erudition and mark her abiding fascination with the transformative potential of biography.
Subjects: Criticism, Feminism and literature, Kate Fansler (Fictitious character), History and criticism, Criticism and interpretation, American Detective and mystery stories, Women and literature, History