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Title: Writing a Woman's Life by CAROLYN G. HEILBRUN ISBN: 0-345-36256-X Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 02 September, 1989 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.75 (4 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Revisiting women's lives
Comment: The best respect we can pay the dead, I believe, is to honor the work they did. When I learned of Heilbrun's death last month, I turned to her books--the mysteries she wrote as Amanda Cross and the literary and cultural criticism she published under her own name. The first time I read Writing a Woman's Life was my junior or senior year in college. I was already familiar with feminist literary criticism, but Heilbrun's thesis was new to me: that even extraordinary women who wrote of how women were entrapped by society had not managed to record, in fiction or biography, how they themselves had defied its dictates; that women's biographies were still characterized by "becoming modesty," with success attributed to luck rather than ambition.
I am more critical of some aspects of Heilbrun's argument now (in particular, I find that her heterocentrism makes her an imperceptive observer of the marriages of lesbian and bisexual writers), but eight years later, parts that seemed irrelevant then strike me more now. Heilbrun writes of many women writers who found their voices and their own particular art much later than their male counterparts: Willa Cather, Dorothy Sayers, Virginia Woolf. The youth of many women writers of the past, she argues, were devoted to struggling with and sometimes conforming to female gender roles; freed from these expectations by age and experience, they could begin to write something new.
What is most compelling to me is Heilbrun's insistence on re-envisioning women's lives--on attempting to view them anew, in all their crooked detail, rather than smoothing out their outlines to conform to the stories she's been taught to expect.
Literature and art get the eternal present: Carolyn Heilbrun is still talking to me. I'm still talking back.
Rating: 5
Summary: Thought Provoking.
Comment: I know that's a cheesy title, but it is so true. I had to read this for a Women Writers class, and I had a hard time getting through the prologue. But once I did, I could not put the book down. Heilbrun had many points that just kept me thinking, and the more I thought about them, the more angry I'd become. Her theories on women's biographies are very true. It is hard to find one where the woman is not painted as a housewife saint void of passionate emotions. It is only in recent years that biographers, mainly female biographers, are writing more and more three dimensional stories of women writers. My best friend from high school just turned 21, and for her birthday I bought her a copy of this book. I lent my copy to a male friend who is spending his summer volunteering in Costa Rica. I am making my boyfriend read this as well. Her thoughts on the reputation of women writers, marriage, and women writing of themselves leave you thinking for weeks. I highly recommend that every woman read this, and make your significant other read it as well. It's hard getting used to the thesis format, but once you do, it is well worth it.
Rating: 5
Summary: Powerful book . . . It will change your life.
Comment: This book set my heart and soul on fire. Carolyn's words ring out with truth and emotion that cannot be held inside.
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Title: Last Gift of Time by Carolyn G. Heilbrun ISBN: 0345422953 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 07 April, 1998 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Reinventing Womanhood by Carolyn G. Heilbrun ISBN: 0393310760 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: September, 1993 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: When Men Were the Only Models We Had: My Teachers Barzun, Fadiman, Trilling (Personal Takes) by Carolyn G. Heilbrun ISBN: 0812236327 Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Pub. Date: November, 2001 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Composing a Life by Mary Catherine Bateson ISBN: 0802138047 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: 10 May, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Death in a Tenured Position by Amanda Cross ISBN: 0345340418 Publisher: Fawcett Books Pub. Date: 12 June, 1986 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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