"Ideas move rapidly when their time comes."
Carolyn Heilbrun (1926–2003)
Best known in academic circles as a pioneering feminist literary scholar and a specialist in British modernist literature with emphasis on the Bloomsbury group, Carolyn Heilbrun also wrote a series of erudite detective novels under the pseudonym Amanda Cross. Heilbrun first came to prominence in 1973 with the publication of Toward a Recognition of Androgyny: Aspects of Male and Female in Literature, which the New York Times called a "frank, passionate plea to move away from sexual polarization and the prison of gender" and "a lively and valuable general introduction to a new way of perceiving our Western cultural tradition."
She wrote scores of articles that interpreted women's literature from a feminist perspective, and eight other scholarly books, including Reinventing Womanhood (1979) and Writing a Woman's Life (1988). Along the way Heilbrun let it be known that she intended to end her own life at age 70, lest her quality of life be unacceptably diminished; in October 2003 , aged 77, she followed through. In the words of her son, Robert, Heilbrun "felt that her life was a journey that had concluded."