A so-called “recovering lawyer,” after 20 dreary years shuffling papers, I decided to pursue the Life of the Mind with a degree in Historical Studies at the Graduate Faculty of the New School. For an assignment regarding a significant historian, I chose Frances Yates, whose bookGiordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition spoke to me. Culling her papers at the Warburg Institute in London led to her first biography, Frances Yates and the Hermetic Tradition. Since then, I've transformed Dame Frances into a sleuth, who explores other unorthodox faith traditions, accompanied by another “recovering lawyer,” whose story mirrors my own, thus enabling me via bio-fiction to further enhance my spirituality.
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Traditionwas published by the University of Chicago Press in 1964, which led me to compile the first biography of the renowned British historian, Frances Yates. In her pivotal study of the 16th-century itinerant Catholic priest, who was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600. Yates revealed a strain of an ancient universal creedless spirituality, which was anathema to the established Church. Yet, five centuries later, spoke to this seeking feminist pilgrim, dissatisfied with traditional patriarchal traditions.
When and where in our life journey we read a book is significant. Written more than a half-century ago, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, published in 1963, changed the world and many women’s lives, including mine. Working behind a typewriter, with a new college degree in hand and waiting for a Prince Charming to marry and rescue me, Friedan made me realize that women would have to be able to take care of themselves and that a supposedly blissful life in suburbia was really a powerless trap. As a result, I went to law school, where at Rutgers Law, I was one of a handful of women students and Ruth Bader Ginsburg was one of two women professors.
Landmark, groundbreaking, classic-these adjectives barely do justice to the pioneering vision and lasting impact of The Feminine Mystique. Published in 1963, it gave a pitch-perfect description of "the problem that has no name": the insidious beliefs and institutions that undermined women's confidence in their intellectual capabilities and kept them in the home. Writing in a time when the average woman first married in her teens and 60 percent of women students dropped out of college to marry, Betty Friedan captured the frustrations and thwarted ambitions of a generation and showed women how they could reclaim their lives. Part social chronicle,…
Nobel Laureate Paz reveals the life and world of 17th-century savant and mystic Sor Juana Inès de la Cruz. To escape an arranged marriage, she entered a convent, where she accumulated one of the great libraries in the Americas and, with one of the few telescopes, confirmed Copernicus’ helio-centric worldview, which threatened the hierarchal Christian Church. Although not burned at the stake, like Bruno, she, too, was martyred by being silenced and having her books destroyed, still another terrible punishment.
Mexico's leading poet, essayist, and cultural critic writes of a Mexican poet of another time and another world, the world of seventeenth-century New Spain. His subject is Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, the most striking figure in all of Spanish-American colonial literature and one of the great poets of her age.
Her life reads like a novel. A spirited and precocious girl, one of six illegitimate children, is sent to live with relatives in the capital city. She becomes known for her beauty, wit, and amazing erudition, and is taken into the court as the Vicereine's protegee. For five…
When we encounter a book is significant. Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces has had a lifelong impact on my spiritual journey. That each of us is the hero(ine) of our own life story and will undergo a recurring series of challenges, from which we emerge transformed, continues to speak to me in my senior years. Many years after a remarkable PBS series of interviews with Bill Moyers, when Campbell pointed to an icon of the Crucifixion and said (shockingly at the time): “That’s you, kiddo!”—I continue to view my life—both good and difficult times—as a spiritual journey and always appreciate stories of other women who candidly share theirs. As a biographer of two spiritually attuned women, one a Quaker, the other an Anglo-Catholic, I fervently urge other women to maintain diaries, so that their stories are recorded and others can learn from their heroic journeys.
Joseph Campbell's classic cross-cultural study of the hero's journey has inspired millions and opened up new areas of research and exploration. Originally published in 1949, the book hit the New York Times best-seller list in 1988 when it became the subject of The Power of Myth, a PBS television special. The first popular work to combine the spiritual and psychological insights of modern psychoanalysis with the archetypes of world mythology, the book creates a roadmap for navigating the frustrating path of contemporary life. Examining heroic myths in the light of modern psychology, it considers not only the patterns and stages…
Writing a Woman’s Life ignited my interest in women’s stories. More significantly, Heilbrun’s feminist Kate Fansler mysteries, written via the pseudonym Amanda Cross, inspired me to transform Frances Yates into a fictional sleuth. To date, Dame Frances (DBE) has encountered other unorthodox faith traditions, as revealed in Tarot; the Convent of Sor Juana de la Cruz in Mexico; among Philadelphia Quakers; and women religious at the Ursuline Convent in Québec. To date, there have been four Frances Yates mysteries.
In this modern classic, Carolyn G. Heilbrun builds an eloquent argument demonstrating that writers conform all too often to society's expectations of what women should be like at the expense of the truth of the female experience. Drawing on the careers of celebrated authors including Virginia Woolf, George Sand, and Dorothy Sayers, Heilbrun illustrates the struggle these writers undertook in both work and life to break away from traditional "male" scripts for women's roles.
The most recent Frances Yates mystery, In the Château, takes place in the Ursuline Convent in Quebec, where Dame Frances has been invited to give a talk regarding the Hermetic Tradition at a conference for women religious from the Americas, including representatives from convent of Mexican feminist mystic Sor Juana de la Cruz, where Dame Frances solved an earlier mystery (In the Convent). While uncovering a thriving ring of mercenary plagiarists, the renowned British historian also explores the historical sites of Quebec and savors its culinary delights. The author is also the first biographer of Frances Yates (published by Ibis Press in 2008), whose great book, Giordano and the Hermetic Tradition, explored the Hermetic Tradition, a 16th-century non-credal universal spirituality. (Translated into Italian and Japanese.)
Two women, a century apart, seek to rebuild their lives after leaving their homelands. Arriving in tropical Singapore, they find romance, but also find they haven’t left behind the dangers that caused them to flee.
Haunted by the specter of terrorism after 9/11, Aislinn Givens leaves her New York career and joins her husband in Southeast Asia when he takes a job there. She acquires several paintings by a colonial-era British artist that she believes are a warning.
The artist, Elizabeth Pennington, tells her own tumultuous story through diary entries that end when World War I reaches the colony with…
"Aislinn Givens leaves a settled life in Manhattan for an unsettled life in Singapore. That painting radiates mystery and longing. So does Clifford Garstang's vivid and simmering novel, The Last Bird of Paradise." –John Dalton, author of Heaven Lake and The Inverted Forest
Two women, nearly a century apart, seek to rebuild their lives when they reluctantly leave their homelands. Arriving in Singapore, they find romance in a tropical paradise, but also find they haven't left behind the dangers that caused them to flee.
In the aftermath of 9/11 and haunted by the specter of terrorism, Aislinn Givens leaves her…
