Writing a Woman's Life

by Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Katha Pollitt (Introduction)

Heilbrun, kadınlar arasındaki dostluk, kadınların bedensel deneyimleri gibi yaşamsal öneme sahip konularda edebiyatın suskunluğunu, bir kadının ileri yaşlarını dolduran zenginliği inceliyor.

Kadının Özyaşamını Yazarken, taptaze ve sezgili yaklaşımıyla, geçmişin ve bugünün gözüpek kadınlarına bir saygı selamı, bütün kadınlara kendi yaşam öykülerini yazmaları için bir çağrı.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Feminism, Womens, Biography, History, Gender

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (January 13, 1926 – October 9, 2003) was an American academic and prolific feminist author of both important academic studies and popular mystery novels under the pen name of Amanda Cross.

Heilbrun attended graduate school in English literature at Columbia University, receiving her M.A. in 1951 and Ph.D in 1959. Among her most important mentors were Columbia professors Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling, while Clifton Fadiman was an important inspiration: She wrote about these three in her final non-fiction work, When Men Were the Only Models We Had: My Teachers Barzun, Fadiman, Trilling (2002).

Heilbrun taught English at Columbia for more than three decades, from 1960 to 1992. She was the first woman to receive tenure in the English Department. Her academic specialty was British modern literature, with a particular interest in the Bloomsbury Group. Her academic books include the feminist study Writing a Woman's Life (1988). In 1983, she co-founded and became co-editor of the Columbia University Press's Gender and Culture Series with literary scholar Nancy K. Miller. From 1985 until her retirement in 1992, she was Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Sydney]

I bought a copy of this book in my early 20s, recently graduated from college, friends heading off to law school, medical school--all kinds of professional opportunities. I was taking a women's studies class at North Seattle Community college.

But I didn't read it until now.

Now I'm raising a teenage daughter who would probably trade her intelligence to fit into our culture's new narrow definition of looking "hot." You know, size 2 butt with size D boobs.

The hope and promise in Writing A Woman's Life has dissipated, it seems, as grown woman try to mimic teenagers. And teenagers value sex appeal above anything else. Heck, even Madonna who seemed to be taking charge of her womanhood in the 80s now struts around in videos with cheerleaders and football players, showing off her skinny body. Trying so hard to hang onto youth is more sad than sexy at 50.

But our culture doesn't give us much else. Even my friends with medical degrees, law degrees, and other important jobs obsesses about body image. (And it's pretty boring to talk about, really.)

Heilbrun's optimism for the future of women just hasn't played out. I kind of wish I'd read this book back in my 20s!

[Elizabeth A.]

quote from the last pages of the book:

"We women have lived too much with closure: "If he notices me, if i maary him, if i get into college, if i get this work accepted, if i get tht job" - there always seems to loom the possibility of something being over, settled, sweeping clear the way for contentment. this is the delusion of a passive life. When the hope for closure is abandoned, when there is an end to fantasy, advernture for women will begin. Endings - the kind austen tacked onto her novels - are for romance or for daydreams, but not for life. One hands in the long-worked-on manuscript only to find that another struggle begins. One gets a job to find new worries previously unimagined. One achieves fame only to discover its profound price.....Sometimes, as with Woolf, or Anne Sexton, or others we have all known, it can lead to the trough of despair, and to the sense of life as without value, or at least of oneself as without the necessary courage or desire. But most often, particularly with the support of other women, the coming of age portends all the freedoms men have always known and women never - mostly the freedom from fulfilling the needs of others and frm being a female impersonator. I once titled an Amanda Cross detective novel Death in a Tenured Position, and it occurs to me now that as we age many of us who are priviledged - not only academics in tenured positions, of course, but more broadly those with some assured place and pattern in their lives, with some financial security - are in danger of choosing to stay right where we are, to undertake each day's routine, and to listen to our arteries hardening. I do not believe death should be allowed to find us seated comfortably in our tenured positions. Virgina Woolf described this condition in Mrs. Dalloway: "Time flaps on the mast, There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame. Where there is nothing". Instead we should make use of our security, our seniority, to take risks, to make noise, to be courageous, to become unpopular."

[Linda Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heilbrun names 1973 as the turning point for modern women's autobiography. May Sarton wrote "Plant Dreaming Deep," a memoir about buying a house and living alone. She was dismayed to discover she'd left out the rage, struggle and despair in the memoir. She wrote "Journal of a Solitude" to reclaim the pain. Thus it is a watershed in women's autobiography.

Biographies about women, written by men - and other women - contain the language of men, and are written in the context of patriarchal culture. Example: The Brontes wrote because they weren't married; as though writing was the booby price for those who didn't get the brass ring of a husband.

The poets of the 1920s began to change that perspective, and Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Dorothy Sayer, and others dug the first shovel into the long road of telling women stories from the real stories of the women.

Check your shelves for any books about friendship between women, or women enjoying their later years. Not there. Morrison claims her book "Sula" was the first book about women friendship. Published in 1973!

I'm going to buy "Writing a Woman's LIfe" for all my writer friends. It's a must for a woman writer's library.

[JHM · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book seemed much more dated than it did the first time I read it, shortly after its publication, but the fundamental message remains relevant despite the fact that today's women have far more socially legitimate options than those who provide Heilbrun's examples.

The main reason for the ongoing relevance is the fact that even exceptional women of times past often told their own stories in ways that would conform to the socially acceptable standards of their time rather than tell the blunt truth about what they did. Among other things, Heilbrun exposes the gap between the active, assertive steps women such as Florence Nightengale, Golda Meir and Jane Addams took to advance their goals, as revealed in their personal letters and journals, and the soft-sell story they told in their autobiographies of how their vocations and their achievements somehow found them. They have re-cast themselves as passive rather than the active champions of their own lives. Biographers, female as well as male, have also struggled to reconcile the truth of women's extordinary lives with their own sense of convention, often writing judgements into their histories.

The other message, the one which I have carried with me since my first reading, is that we can only envision futures for ourselves that we have stories to describe. The more honest stories which are told by and about real women and their struggles and achievements, the more possibilities will open up for those who read them.

Heilbrun, an English professor, is also mystery writer Amanda Cross. Her story of how she decided to write those books, and why she chose to do so under a pseudonym, adds a valuable personal element to the book.

[Theryn Fleming · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heilbrun was an English professor at Columbia when female professors were rarities and she was pissed off at how male academics treated their female colleagues. She felt it was important that women express anger (tell their stories) so that other women could learn from their experiences (or realize they are not alone).

After I finished the book, I looked Heilbrun up and discovered that she quit her position at Columbia (age 66) because she felt unwelcome. Then she committed suicide (age 77) because she felt her life had been completed. Ack. From what I've read a lot of women looked up to her as a role model. So for those who were following her story—they're left with what? The jerks of the world will always win (or at least they'll wear you down so you get tired of fighting) so you may as well kill yourself? Boo. I really liked this book—but this coda left me conflicted.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve got a dozen post-it tags marking thought-provoking comments in this little book. In some ways, it’s seriously out of date in discussion of women and marriage, for example. At other points, it is still unsettlingly accurate.The biggest drawback of the book for me is that it reads like a university term paper. Some chapters have pages and pages of quotes strung together with minimal authorial comment. Still, I’m glad I read it.

[Theodora Goss · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such a smart, wonderful book. Recommended for anyone writing a biography of a woman writer, or any woman writer considering her autobiography. A slim volume, but a deep, complex, satisfying read.

[Keely Hyslop · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adored this book. It might very well knock off one of the books currently on my favorites list. I had to read it with a notepad handy to take notes on all the biographies, novels, and poetry books she mentioned that I hadn't heard that will now be trickling onto my too read list.

Plus, I love the voice of the author. When a book can be extremely academic and yet highly entertaining that's a rare feat in my eyes.

Simply stated, the book is about women's biographies and how they've been historically framed in terms of patriarchal narratives. Great women authors who failed to marry became great authors as a consolation prize to comfort themselves about their failure as women. Women authors who married were either good women in that they were able to run households and be authors at the same time or they were bad women in that they neglected the duties that were assigned to their sex.

In 'Writing a Woman's Life' Heilbrum is trying to construct a new narrative. She looks at several prominent women's biographies and asks what was left out and what other interpretation based on letters the woman had written and other primary sources might the biographer have come to were he (and sometimes she) to have stepped outside the traditional frame of the woman's role to interpret the author's life on its own terms for its own merits.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough!

[Laura]

A landmark feminist opus that I had somehow never read before now. I could definitely see how it broke new ground, but also how in some ways it is an artifact of its times. Women's deep friendships are vividly in view nowadays, and women's public anger no longer in short supply. So if Heilbrun's incisive critiques seem dated, well that is a good sign.

[Jen Blau · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took a bit for my contemporary mind to get in line with the writing of Heilbrun. Very happy I stuck it out. It’s so intriguing what a woman writer—in the early to mid 20th Century— did or didn’t do, what she did and didn’t write about.
I was most enamored with Chapter Six:

“Marilyn Monroe was a female impersonator. We are all trained to be female impersonators.” — Gloria Steinem

While much of the chapter (and the entire book) is underlined by me, these are some of the passages that stand out:

“... women are well beyond youth when they begin, often unconsciously, to create another story. Not even do they recognize it as another story.”

“... the [women’s] pseudonym began to function more prominently as a name of power, the mark of a private christening into a second self, a rebirth into linguistic primacy.”

“I believe that women have long searched, and continue to search, for an identity “other” than their own.”

“I created fantasy. Without children, unmarried, I constrained by the opinions of others, rich and beautiful, the newly created Kate Fansler now appears to me a figure out of never never land... I wanted to give her everything and see what she could do with it.”

“I had very good reason for secrecy, but as I now perceive, the secrecy itself was wonderfully attractive. Secrecy is power.”
Heilbrun on writing her own works of fiction under the pseudonym Amanda Cross.

[Shirin A.]

Stunned that none of the reviews mention the wealth of sound life advice Heilbrun inadvertently sprinkles throughout this slim yet potently invigorating volume.

My only wish is that it had examined autobiographical efforts at greater length since that's my area of interest, nonetheless this should be an unmissable read for not only writers, but also women from all walks of life!

Five stars because I loved loved reading it (and I predict it will become a personal favourite) and yet I did notice the problematic use of the concept of power and the fact that several ideas come through as a little dated - not the life advice though, which stoutly stood the test of time!

[Susan Mock · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not just about how authors write, or don't write, about women's lives. It is about women. It is a feminist book and reminds me of entering the work world in the early 70s and what has changed.
More should have changed in all these years, but, alas, it is VERY slow. She is a fascinating author and I have read most of the Amanda Cross books. What stops me from reading all of them is that it is hard to get copies! I have read several of her other nonfiction books and enjoyed them as well.

[Jo Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read it, but immediately feel I need to read it again.

[Katrinka]

One more that I don't know how to rate, but which feels true, and in many ways, reassuring.

[Kaley Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will be rereading this one forever

[James Askari · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a form of literary criticism, Heilbrun's book is both exploration and exhortation: noting how few available narratives there are of adventurous, self-determining lives for women, she gives permission to her younger women readers to outgo conventional expectations. The book is open, moving easily from subject to subject, from personal recollection and memoir to the concerns of feminist poststructuralism; it is warm and generous, and calm in tenor. Heilbrun suggests that women may only come into themselves when they are past the age of accepted attractiveness (to men); they can slip off the marriage plot, though it is not normal for them to be granted the place (men's place) as the protagonists of a quest plot. Nor are there many narrative of female friendship (Vera Brittain and her Oxford classmate Winifred Holtby may be exceptional here), of female friendship deriving from shared work in public, or of a 'reinvented' heterosexual marriage of equals. A satisfying marriage, she thinks, is more closely modelled on the friendship, the male friendship of Epictetus, Erasmus or Montagine, than based on sexual passion; it is akin, in Stanley Cavell's terms, to a 'remarriage', an ongoing conversation on themes of shared interest.

Repeatedly Heilbrun finds the politics of language and of society marked by the same difficulties for women--notably the problem of assuming one's power, 'power' being the ability to hold one's place in any language or organisation 'necessary for action'. Instead, women are urged to efface themselves in conventional expectations, and to conform in the trajectories of their life-stories to norms of maternal and wifely 'service' to men. There are few narrative forms for women breaking free of their assigned scripts; Eliot imagined a Dorothea, but could not create a liberated woman writer. Some 'watershed' event is necessary for women seeking to break from societal norms--only happening, often, after thirty, when the chance for marriage appears to have gone, or after fifty--in the case of Woolf with her liberating polemic Three Guineas and more overtly feminist work of fiction The Years--when the costs of dissidence can be weighed more accurately against those of imaginative self-suppression. More particularly, Heilbrun points to the so-called 'confessional' poetry of a group of women born in the 20s--Levertov, Anne Sexton, Plath, Maxine Kunin, Adrienne Rich--for its 'marvelous dismantling' of the assumption of female autobiography.

[Beth Browne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This little book should be required reading for every graduating high school student. Although I found it hard to get into at the beginning, by the end I was savoring every word. Author Carolyn Heilbrun had her finger on the pulse of what it means to be a woman, even so long ago when this book was published in 1988. It’s sad how little we’ve progressed since the exciting days of the Suffrage and Women’s Liberation movements.

But this book allows the modern woman to take heart, that our place in society has changed, if only minutely and that more changes are possible. I found the actual writing in this book somewhat hard to follow at times because the sentence structure is academic in its syntax and vocabulary. As a non-English major, I am unfamiliar with many of the authors and books the author references, but her message is clear. It’s also very sobering because Heilbrun holds nothing back in her scathing indictment of our patriarchal culture. So much so, that I’m surprised this book has not been banned.

On my copy of the book, underneath the “National Bestseller” banner, there is this quote on the cover from The Washington Post: “A provocative study that should be in every writer’s library.” I would argue that this book should be in every woman’s hand, writer or not. I thought I was an enlightened, liberated woman, but this book shows just how little that means. Heilbrun holds nothing back and openly covers issues such as working life, sexuality and just what it means to be a woman in a male-dominated society. It would be an eye-opener for men as well as for women. As much as I want to pass this little jewel on to every woman I know, starting with my own daughter, I think I might have to read it again first, something I almost never do. I am deeply grateful to have had this little book fall into my hands, at long last, and I recommend it to everyone.

[Lindsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though not cosigned (for instance, the title might be changed to Writing a White Woman's Life—aside from some engagement with Toni Morrison's fiction and a couple quotations), still the reading of this book has made me both braver and more thoughtful. (Criticism not often capable of such transformation in this reader.) V appreciative for this well-written work.

[Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The beginning was highly interesting and still very relevant. The later chapters were less so, and more dependent on the reader's knowledge of female writers well-known in the Western cannon as well as feminism, to some extent. I'd be very interested in reading a response to this book written from a modern feminist perspective.

[Sandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fabulous study of Virginia Woolf, George Sand, George Eliot, and Charlotte Bronte (among others), illustrating why women, especially women writers, need a feminist perspective and a new paradigm for their lives, devoting themselves to the quest instead of being captured and confined. Excellent.

[Jennie · Rating 5 out of 5]

You can find my review and text excerpts in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tecxt...

[Suzanne Ondrus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can't wait to read it again! -talks about anger as forbidden to women, the desire for power, and the desire to control one's life (13). She says if you cannot show anger, you are refused power and control (15). If one is denied anger, she says that then madness and depression occur (15). Women with power are criticized. (16). "Power is the ability to take one's place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one's part matter"(18). "Safety and closure, which have always been held out to women as the ideals of female destiny, are not places of adventure, or experience, or life. Safety and closure (and enclosure) are, rather, the mirror of the Lady of Shalott. They forbid life to be experienced directly"(20). ..."the possible hidden lives of accomplished women who were educated enough to have had a choice and brave enough to have made one"(59). In reference to Kumin, she discusses the fear women have of analyzing and critiquing their fathers. -I want to check out Rich's essay "Split at the Root" that she mentions due to its direct address to her father. She mentions Kumin and Rich tapping into anger... I enjoyed her discussion of women writers' marriages and love relationships, as well as female friendships. She notes that female friendship is "sharing a love of work in the public sphere" (108). She also relays her personal struggle with negative perception as a writer of detective fiction because academia would not promote her if this was known, so she wrote under a pseudonym. (110). She found writing was a mission to create a space for herself (113). -even if it was merely "psychic space". I loved the ending of the book about how women have lived with too much closure, meaning we think we need to just get something and then everything will be all settled. The author says that this is a dangerous way of thinking because it keeps us from evolving and from having adventures. This mindset of closure is a passive mindset she says.

[Susan Lampe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was written in l988 and republished in 2008. The book offers an in-depth look at women writing throughout history, how their words have often been silenced and snuffed out. An interesting look is taken at women poets to include the Greek poetess Sappho, author of 5,000 poems which were burned by Constantine to silence her voice. She explores how women like the Bronte sisters and George Sand and George Eliot sought anonymity by taking names of men. Heilbrun claims women poets led in writing truth about their lives, women such as Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton as well as her favorite Virginia Woolf. She takes us through the time when white women began to write differently than white men, and then how black women wrote differently than white women. Heilbrun depicts the struggles throughout many years of women who attempted to speak truth. She explains how Toni Morrison and Alice Walker presented new narratives for women and new ways of understanding narrative. I found myself realizing how this also led to the advent of memoir, first for men as a way of telling their stories and then for women. This is a book I have read before but I also ordered the 2008 copy. I found the stories still relevant to my own struggles as an author and a woman seeking to tell her own stories.

[Hollie Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite enjoyable actually. She says there are four ways to write a woman's life - the woman may do it as autobiography, she may do it as fiction, a biographer may tell her story, or that she may write it long before she lives it. Then she explores these ways and the very limited stories that women are allowed to live. How, in fiction, women's stories ended after the courting - in most early works, the woman essentially ended with the marriage. She talks about how society treated any woman who lived, or dared to write about a life outside those norms. I wished she had tackled the fifth way to write a woman's story - fragmentarily in a journal or diary, but here again, that genre is treated as non-existent or lesser than 'real' literature.

[Renita Weems · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book over 20 years ago and while it may be less true today, it was certainly true back when it was written and when I read it that women's biographies follow certain conventions. That women are prevented from talking openly and bluntly about their lives. Society frowns on women who talk openly about the unconventional areas of their pasts. Ambition is frowned on in women. So is a certain amount of wildness. But let's not fool ourselves, it was true back then and it's today as well. Women who step out of line and aim higher are brutally mocked and threatened with violence. And women of ambition know it which is why many women's memoirs boil down to sappy pulp. Always struggling with striking a balance between ambition and being chosen, drive and conscription.

[Deb · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book and at the same time found it a dense read aimed more at academics or writers. It had me turning over a lot of corners of pages (to come back to) and better appreciating women's autobiographies I've read - and that's my favourite genre. Caused me to think about what was missing from those narratives, appreciate the rule-breaking of societal norms that some represented in content and/or style and even think about what I'm self censoring from my own life story.

[Natasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Profound examination into writing a woman’s life in the 70s and 80s. “Even in more recent literature, we see how alone women are, how without close women friends are Jane Austen’s heroines, and Charlotte Bronte’s, and George Eliot’s. There will be narratives of female lives only when women no longer live their lives isolated in the houses and the stories of men” (47). True but I wish Heilbrun had lived to see women do this.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting look at the way women have "written" their lives. It was written in 1988 but felt, to me, very similar to the kinds of discussions we saw ( or had) in the 1970s. Heilbrun focused primarily on biographies and autobiographies of women writers. It felt dated to me because it is, but there is also quite a lot that is still being discussed and worked through for women in 2021.

[Devin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book told me exactly what I needed to hear at an uncertain time in my life. If you were raised to be a woman (although anyone struggling with identity in the face of a dehumanizing over culture could benefit from this) this book may help you shift your sense of self from that of passive bystander to active seeker.

Women need internal stories of themselves as the heroine, the adventurer, the one who strives, in order to have positive self worth. Without it we may see ourselves as victims and deny ourselves the satisfaction of a life lived to the hilt.

[Karen-Leigh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Been a long time but I kept the book so it must have been good. Maybe time to reread.