Hamlet's Mother and Other Women: Feminist Essays on Literature - Softcover

Heilbrun, Carolyn G.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0704342731 ISBN 13: 9780704342736

Publisher: The Women's Press Ltd, 1991

Synopsis

In the three decades since her revolutionary and seminal article "The Character of Hamlet's Mother," Carolyn Heilbrun has been a prophet in the field of women and literature, gender and culture. This collection of graceful and uncompromising essays charts her development as a feminist writer and critic, which has culminated in such groundbreaking works as REINVENTING WOMANHOOD and WRITING A WOMAN'S LIFE.

Shakespeare's Gertrude was first among many literary figures illuminated by Heilbrun's feminist sensibility. Others include Homer's Penelope -- an archetypal single parent, weaving herself a new life for which she was given no script; Jo in LITTLE WOMEN, a model of autonomy for generations of female readers; Elizabeth Bennet, remarkable for the promise of friendship in her marriage with Darcy; and Harrriet Vane, outrageously unique on many counts. The consistency and clarity of Heilbrun's vision in matched only by its heterogeneity, as she discusses Margaret Mead and Freud's daughters, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, resistance to feminist studies in academia, mothers and daughters, fiction and myth, tomboys and surrogate sons, and the detective story, of which Heibrun herself (as Amanda Cross) is one of the ablest practitioners. HAMLET'S MOTHER AND OTHER WOMEN will spark recognition, again and again, in readers on their own quest for female redefinition.

"[A] witty, learned collection of essays . . . filled with delicate, sometimes startling gems of perception . . . . Provocative." -- New York Newsday

About this title

Review

[Heilbrun's] arguments for the centrality of feminist criticism are advanced with passion and enlivened with wit. The New York Times Book Review A book to delight the heart... filled with delicate, sometimes startling gems of perception. New York Newsday A wonderful, living book for those who love to read and to think. It is engaged, fervent, good-humored; it is wise and intellectually substantive and a real pleasure to read. -- Andrea Dworkin

About the Author

Carolyn G. Heilbrun is Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She has written Christopher Isherwood, Toward Androgyny, Reinventing Womanhood, Writing a Woman's Life, and numerous works of detective fiction under the name Amanda Cross.

About this edition

• Publisher: The Women's Press Ltd
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0704342731
• ISBN 13: 9780704342736
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288