Customer Reviews

Writing a Womans Life

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Since I first read this book over 10 years ago, I think I must have purchased more than 15 copies--some for myself and others to give to other people, that's how strongly I felt about it. It is important how we see the importance of writing our lives, how they have been mis-written, mis-understood, and mis-read for a very long time. Dr. Heilbrun is clear, straight-forward, and to the point in her observations. For such a slender volume, it has an awful lot to say.

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.

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.

Although Heilburn's slim book is almost two decades old, it is still relevant for women who want to write their life story. She examines the shortcomings of women's biographies in the past. And she suggests wise and practical approaches to conveying a life as the woman at the center of the story actually experienced it.

This book set my heart and soul on fire. Carolyn's words ring out with truth and emotion that cannot be held inside.

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.

Too many 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.

When I was in college many years ago, I took only one women's study course, but it made me rethink the way women's history had been written, or should I say distorted, and certainly ignored, by patriarchal biases and discrimination.

Essentially, the book's premise is that women of the 20's and 30's (a generation author Carolyn Heilbrun focused on) were very much confined by conventional expectations. A few writers either chose, or felt forced, to adopt different identities to pursue their passion for writing and to live their lives as writers. Those brave enough to be themselves and defy societal expectation endured negative ramifications; ramifications that continued at the hands of their biographers. The perspectives of twentieth century men writing about women incorporated too many biases and values to provide readers will a full and true picture of the lives of women. Even women writing autobiographies tended to conceal a great deal.

Although the book was interesting, author Carolyn Heilbrun belabored some points, particularly in the twenty-five page introduction. Curiously, the book lacked a table of contents, although there was an index and list of cited work. This book was published in 1988 when words like "stay-at-home dad" and "man crush" were foreign, and a lot of men defined themselves differently than they do today. Generally speaking, women's stories are probably told with more truth and candidness than they once were, but really, does any biographer really know the whole truth, and is any autobiographer, male or female, willing to share it in print? On some levels, revealing all is still a risky business, but not to the degree that it once was. It's too bad that Heilbrun, who passed away several years ago, is no longer here to see the positive changes.

Fascinating work on how women conceal themselves in order to conform, even in their autobiographies. Wonderful discussion on how women have needed, as writers especially, to create a new language for their experience. The last chapter, on claiming power and authenticity after 50, is wonderful. The irony is that when Heilbrun was 66 she left her post at Columbia, stating she felt unwelcome, and committed suicide at 77. The shadow of her life's end falls heavily on the work.