In their blooming sixties: aging as awakening in Amanda Cross’ an imperfect spy and the puzzled heart

Abstract

The writer and Columbia professor Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (1926–2003) is widely known for her best-selling Kate Fansler mystery novels, published under the pseudonym of Amanda Cross. However, she also authored remarkable pieces of non-fiction in which she asserted her long-standing commitment to feminism, while she also challenged established notions on women and aging and advocated for a reassessment of these negative views. Taking her essays in feminism and literary criticism as a basis and two of her later novels as substantiation to my argument, this paper will try to illustrate the ways in which the aging female characters in her Kate Fansler series became an instrument to make her views on female aging available to a mass audience of women readers. My aim is to reveal the ways in which Heilbrun’s highly commercial mystery novels as Amanda Cross were used as a catalyst that informed her feminist principles while vindicating the need to rethink about issues concerning the cultural and literary representations of mature women