Successful female aging for beginners: Carolyn Heilbrun/Amanda Cross and perspectives of gendered aging inThe Players Come Again
Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: Although Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (1926–2003) is best known for her best-selling mystery novels, published under the pseudonym of Amanda Cross, she also authored remarkable pieces of non-fiction which evidence an intense reflection upon female aging as well as her long-standing commitment to feminism. Works such as Reinventing Womanhood (1979), The Representation of Women in Fiction (1983), Writing a Woman's Life (1988), and The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty (1997) explore the ways in which women in general and the author in particular experience the changes that maturity involves as an enriching process rather than as a path into decay and loss. This paper contends that these might perhaps shed a new light into her fiction as Amanda Cross, which includes The Players Come Again (1990). Taking her essays in feminism and literary criticism as a basis, my aim was to reveal the extent to which Heilbrun's commercial mystery novels represented a springboard to the theories she put forward in her essays, which vindicated the difficulties as well as the joys involved in a gendered experience of aging.
Source: Journal of Gender Studies
Author: Emma Domínguez-Rué
Institution: Universitat de Lleida
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2084707647