In the following essay, Dever comments on the state of feminism through an exploration of the relationship between academic and personal life in Marilyn French's The Women's Room and Heilbrun's Death in a Tenured Position.

In the following review of Writing a Woman's Life, Simon examines Heilbrun's assertions about the problems and constraints of the genres of female biography and autobiography.

In the following essay, Feldman explores the collaboration between Heilbrun and Gloria Steinem, which resulted in The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem.

In the following review of When Men Were the Only Models We Had, Merkin praises the work's scholarship, commenting that Heilbrun “affords us an inside look at the conflicted and not always straightforward route she took in carving out a piece of intellectual turf to call her own.”

In the following review, Breines criticizes The Education of a Woman, arguing that the biography is “strangely transparent, an unmessy narrative of Steinem's admirable life with little attention to depth, complications, or contradictions.”

In the following review of When Men Were the Only Models We Had, Hart provides a scathing indictment of Heilbrun's book, asserting that “we witness the melancholy sight of a mind in ideologically induced disintegration.”

In the following review, Zilversmit praises the essays in The Last Gift of Time as courageous and inspiring looks at the process of aging.

In the following review, Gornick maintains that one of the major thematic concerns of The Education of a Woman is the impact of Steinem's beauty and femininity on her life and career.

In the following review, Winik contends that The Education of a Woman “reads like a biography written by the subject's feminist-academic-maiden-aunt—too careful, too dry and too doting.”

In the following review, Emsley compliments Heilbrun's portrayal of the challenges that women face in the modern world in Women's Lives, but concludes that the work's conclusion is incomplete and unsatisfying.

In the following review, King offers a negative assessment of The Education of a Woman, asserting that Heilbrun's inability to objectively portray her subject is “maddening.”

In the following review, the critic offers a positive assessment of The Last Gift of Time, praising the collection as entertaining and insightful.

In the following review of The Education of a Woman, Young argues that Heilbrun's biased view of her subject compromises the biography as a serious study of Steinem's life and work.

In the following review, McCarthy applies Heilbrun's ideas in Writing a Woman's Life to several case studies, including political activist Carol Fennelly's fasting campaign and the dispute at the Morristown Carmel convent.

In the following excerpt, Toth praises the eloquence, honesty, and wit of the essays in Writing a Woman's Life.

In the following review of Writing a Woman's Life, Sandmaier commends Heilbrun's contention that women need to chronicle the true stories of their lives as well as the female experience as a whole.

[There are a few] structural limitations or "faults" which amateurize the Cross books a little…. (p. 37) To begin with her dialogue, which is more important in Cross than for another style of writer: Cross adopts the technical convention that each important speaker—as opposed to "character"—shares the same conversational style; by implication, the same background….

In the following review of Writing a Woman's Life, Mintz compliments Heilbrun as an astute and provocative feminist scholar.

In the following review, Simon derides the lack of sympathy for men as well as the narrow focus of Heilbrun's thesis in Writing a Woman's Life.

In the following review, Vallas asserts that Hamlet's Mother and Other Women demonstrates Heilbrun's significant role in the progress of literary and gender studies.

In the following excerpt, Reddy delineates the role of contemporary feminism in Heilbrun's series of mystery novels, written under the pseudonym Amanda Cross.

In the following excerpt, Hudson considers the utility and readability of the critical essays collected in The Representation of Women in Fiction.

To Carolyn Heilbrun … the very salvation of our species depends upon our "recognition of androgyny" as a conscious ideal; her book [Toward a Recognition of Androgyny] is a frank, passionate plea for us to move "away from sexual polarization and the prison of gender toward a world in which individual roles and modes of personal behavior can be freely chosen." Though she has constructed a critical-scholarly study to support her argument—she moves with dizzying rapidit...

[In Reinventing Womanhood] Heilbrun is angry at her colleagues' refusal to help those women who struggle to change male thought and institutions in a serious way. Recognizing their pain and anxiety, she nonetheless urges them to remain outsiders rather than scurrying for a safe place at the male center, to "bond with the powerless against those in power."… Yet angry as she is, Heilbrun respects the sheer fact of female achievement and studies the lives of distinguished women in o...

In the following review, Robinson notes the dislocation of structure and content in An Imperfect Spy.

[Toward a Recognition of Androgyny] has three parts: the first, "The Hidden River of Androgyny," catalogues random appearances of androgyny in literature from Homer onward; the second examines the emergence of female central characters in the novel; the third presents Bloomsbury as real-life exemplar of "an androgynous world." (p. viii) Unfortunately, Heilbrun's book is so poorly researched that it may disgrace the subject in the eyes of serious scholars…. "T...

[Carolyn Heilbrun] is no different from any number of women who became feminists by joining private feelings to a set of political and philosophical principles that have been extant and evolving for—well, let us take Mary Wollstonecraft as a starting point—nearly two centuries. [The] unsettling practice of draping an oft-stated notion or simple observation in the garments of radical originality pervades ["Reinventing Womanhood"]. Mrs. Heilbrun … believes that few women ima...

"Death in a Tenured Position" is set at Harvard. (p. 253) Miss Cross, in the person of Kate, hates Harvard and quotes Henry James. She quotes Henry James because Kate always quotes somebody in every Amanda Cross mystery—as if she were trying to be Harriet Vale in a novel by Dorothy Sayers—and she hates Harvard because of sexism.

In the following excerpt, Champlin argues that the strength of Sweet Death, Kind Death is Heilbrun's portrayal of academic life.

Amanda Cross, a skilled detective story writer, has given us a lighter side of ["Joyceana"] in her The James Joyce Murder. She has kept pace with the Joyce "industry" and has given us a series of quite plausible events leading to a murder and its curious aftermath…. Each chapter is ingeniously titled after a story from Dubliners. Amanda Cross manages this with a minimum of awkwardness. She must stretch a bit to call a Berkshire town "Araby" and to arrange for...

In the following review, the critic asserts that the plot in Honest Doubt draws from many autobiographical elements of Heilbrun's own life.

Murder doesn't have to be a dreadful, dreary business, at least when it occurs in the pages of fiction. It can be told in a civilized, witty, and learned fashion with an observant eye on society's pretensions and pomposities. Ard no one has a sharper eye than Amanda Cross, whose delightful Kate Fansler, professor-cum-sleuth, returns to find Death in a Tenured Position…. One of Kate's former classmates has been appointed to the Harvard University faculty as its first woman English...

Amanda Cross writes mystery stories featuring a college professor (of English) named Kate Fansler. The dialogue in her books is supercivilized, in the drawing-room tradition, with long, resounding periods…. Amanda Cross knows her Wilde and Shaw, and fine models they are for any writer. But the trouble with "The Question of Max" is that it wears this kind of Beautiful Writing like a great purple badge. Most of the Cross characters tend to talk this way; and since the author, after all, i...

Readers of Amanda Cross's earlier books will know that Kate's own manner is thoroughly agreeable, her observations witty and her erudition lightly displayed. All the qualities that make her so engaging a heroine are still apparent—but somehow her detecting has become a little perfunctory [in A Death in the Faculty, published in the United States as Death in a Tenured Position]. "Not exactly a full roster of suspects, Kate sadly thought"; certainly this novel has neither th...

[The Garnett Family] has some respectable qualities: it is clearly written and commonsensically planned; it is almost entirely free from those intrusions of the author's personality which mar many social biographies; it is not wrested into a strange shape so as to body out a proud thesis. Miss Heilbrun has pursued her facts patiently and, so far as I can judge, scrupulously; her book can hardly help being very interesting. For all that, it is a slight book and lacks the texture its subject demands. I...

What better locale for a feminist murder mystery than Harvard, where women make up a minuscule three percent of the tenured faculty and sexism-and-sherry in the senior common room is still an honored tradition?… As it happens, I went to Harvard, and was prepared from page 1 [of Death in a Tenured Position] to cheer Cross' spirited dishing of my lamentably sexist alma mater. Said dishing is easily the book's best feature. This time out, Cross … is a better feminist than mystery no...

Amanda Cross's Death in a Tenured Position features her recurring amateur detective and professor of English, Kate Fansler. She is witty, attractive, well-bred, and independent though married. These qualities make for excellent verbal fencing with the lesbians who need her help to remove suspicion from them…. Cross pokes a good deal of pointed fun at a crusty institution, and a little at feminist extremism. When she is not tied down by exposition, her prose is abundantly witty, but several tim...

Amanda Cross in recent years has been attracting attention with her Kate Fansler stories and the latest is "The Theban Mysteries."… Again the action is built around literature, in this case a seminar on "Antigone." There is something of the Elizabeth Daly quality about the literate, low-keyed, sophisticated writing. There is no great drama in this story of an expensive girls' school in New York. But we get a study of rebellious youth, and even a few insights into th...