Catching Courage

Abstract Carolyn Heilbrun served as a bridge between the explosion of feminist scholarship within the academy and readers eager for new ways to think about women’s lives. Trained as a literary scholar, she learned to write in a non-academic voice for a broad popular audience, penning multiple books on writing women’s lives while also authoring a series of feminist detective stories under the pen name Amanda Cross. Consistent themes included the importance of women’s friendships and the opportunities for women to experience personal growth in middle age and beyond. Despite her academic and popular success, she felt marginalized at Columbia University, where she taught for thirty-three years, and in 1992, she resigned. Eleven years later, believing in the right to die on one’s own terms, she took her own life. Heilbrun and her generation of feminist scholars laid the foundations for the emergence of the field of feminist biography.