Writing a Woman's Life | 
 enlarge | Author: Carolyn G. Heilbrun
Creator: Katha Politt
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 416843
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 144
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.8
ISBN: 0393331644
Dewey Decimal Number: 920.72
EAN: 9780393331646
ASIN: 0393331644
Publication Date: August 4, 2008
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Condition: Softcover. Brand new, never used. Ships the next business day, with tracking and delivery confirmation sent to your email.
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Amazon.com Review
With subtlety and great eloquence, Carolyn Heilbrun shows how, throughout the centuries, those who write about women's lives--biographers andautobiographers--have suppressed the truth of the female experience, in order to make the "written life" conform to the expectations of what that life should be. Heilbrun also examines literature's silence on such vital topics as friendship between women, the female physical experience, and the richness that often imbues a women's later years. Recommended reading for everyone, especially women and writers.
Product Description
"A provocative study that should be in every writer's library."—Washington Post
In this modern classic, Carolyn G. Heilbrun builds an eloquent argument demonstrating that writers conform all too often to society's expectations of what women should be like at the expense of the truth of the female experience. Drawing on the careers of celebrated authors including Virginia Woolf, George Sand, and Dorothy Sayers, Heilbrun illustrates the struggle these writers undertook in both work and life to break away from traditional "male" scripts for women's roles.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Invaluable Guide for Women Memoirists January 25, 2008
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.
Revisiting women's lives January 2, 2004
12 out of 14 found this review helpful
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.
 Thought Provoking. June 10, 2001
14 out of 15 found this review helpful
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.
Powerful book . . . It will change your life. February 1, 1999
7 out of 11 found this review helpful
This book set my heart and soul on fire. Carolyn's words ring out with truth and emotion that cannot be held inside.
A Must-Read for Women October 21, 1998
23 out of 24 found this review helpful
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.
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