dissection in its pages. As I have said, this is not the book that I would have
written had I had the freedom to alter received wisdom of what 'proper'
books should look like. On the other hand, several of its chapters repeat the
urgency of holding on to an alternative vision. In an essay written in 1924,
the Danish writer Karen Blixen asked:

Do some of you want to fly? Is it something you really want, and does
the idea attract you more than anything else? Then hang on to your
wish for a couple of thousand years and you will get wings. ³

It is not uncommon to find in fiction that women want to fly, whereas men
are attracted to the sea. ⁴ This may be because for men the sea represents
women, whereas for women flying is something that men do. Equally, the
resonance of the flying image may owe its strength to women's urge to get
out of their confines.

Karen Blixen used a male name for her writing -- Isak Dinesen. When the
American writer Carolyn Heilbrun wanted to write feminist detective
stories, she also used a pseudonym, for fear of having her alternative vision
used against her in her academic life as an aspiring professor of English
literature. ⁵ In her most famous alter ego work, Death in a Tenured Position, ⁶
one of America's most renowned and misogynist universities is given some
money to fund its first female professorship. After a hard search, an
appropriately non-feminist woman is found for this post. She is discovered
dead after only a few months. Everyone suspects the male professors of
having killed her. But the female sleuth, a considerably more
uncompromising version of Miss Marple, works out that she killed herself.
The whole environment was simply too inhospitable.

There are various messages in this. One is that women have their own
ways of undermining masculine culture. Another is that things have got
better, and there is no need to kill ourselves any more. A third is one to which
the writer Carolyn Heilbrun herself draws attention: that no-one should be
allowed to die seated comfortably in a 'tenured' position. If women achieve
such positions, they must use them to go on being awkward.

With age comes a blessed relief from the strain of having to be a 'female
impersonator?'. ⁷ The chapters in this volume do, I suppose, speak of my own
struggle to get away from impersonation. It is a fight for authenticity -- both
for tenure and for the right to say things that will ensure that this particular
form of male-invented closure is unlikely ever to be available to women.

-xii-