JAMES TIPTREE, JR.–THE DRAMA.

JAMES TIPTREE, JR.–THE DRAMA. The first page of Phillips’s book makes a dramatic beginning. “In 1921, in the Belgian Congo a-six-year-old girl from Chicago with a pith helmet on her blond curls walks at the head of a line of native porters…..In 1970 a man who does not exist sits down to write at a typewriter.” Tiptree (named after a jar of jam) created a masculine persona by drawing on details of Alice’s life. Alice had been in Africa, she knew guns, she had worked for the CIA. The drama of the mysterious author is like that of the mysterious author of JANE EYRE. On page 357, when a postcard appears with the question, “Is it true that James Tiptree is Alice Sheldon?”, it had almost the same impact on me as my favorite moment in literary history, when the publisher of JANE EYRE encounters in his office two little ladies from rural Yorkshire, one of whom, he discovers, is Currer Bell, the author of the most notorious book in England.