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  • Anne McCaffrey: A Life with Dragons
  • Batya Weinbaum (bio)
Anne McCaffrey: A Life with Dragons by Robin Roberts. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi2007, 243 pp., $28.00 hardcover.

This text by a feminist science fiction critic depicts a writer who came of age in a time when that genre was still male dominated, looking into the life of a woman who learned to take herself seriously as a writer when women as a whole and her immediate support, her husband, did not. I first became aware of Anne McCaffrey when I was interviewed about a feminist science fiction journal, Femspec, which I founded. The journalist, writing for a local paper, took note of my daughter's presence in the office. The young writer suggested that my daughter might enjoy Anne's books, as she herself had read them at the age my daughter was at the moment. My daughter became an avid reader of a fantasy world into which she periodically disappeared, but I never took the time to go there with her myself. I might have, had I known the feminist odyssey of the woman who created those books to which I had entrusted my offspring's consciousness.

First of all, Anne lives in a home—Dragonhold-Underhill—in Ireland, with a horse stable, several animals that wander around, staff, and secluded land. She remains outside of the community, but has been accepted as an insider during the forty-odd years she has lived there. Anne's ancestors were Irish immigrants who came to America. The only non-Irish person in her family was a grandmother who died before Anne was born. Anne's [End Page 220] grandfather was a cop in Boston. He never advanced his position; he refused to take part in the persecution of newer immigrants by Irish policemen. When Anne left her abusive husband, she immigrated to Ireland.

Anne's father took her to work as a treat sometimes, long before take-your daughter-to-work day. Kept away by World War II from when Anne was fifteen until she was twenty-seven, her father was extremely strict, indifferent, and judgmental. He was a public figure, enjoyed witticisms, and became a model for Anne's numerous heroic characters. According to Roberts, Anne was always trying to get the approval of her stern, unapproachable father.

Anne was a middle child. Hugh, her older brother, was four years her senior and Kevin was her baby brother. She always felt different, her sense of otherness deriving perhaps from the impact of prejudice against the Irish. Both parents read aloud to her every night, fortifying her against the sense of inferiority that may have lingered from the era of "No Irish Need Apply" in want ads. Her first published story, "Freedom of the Race," was purchased for $100 by Sam Moscowitz, a member of another ethnic group whose struggle with otherness and differentness similarly produced much science fiction in the early years of the genre.

When the children were young, Anne's mother endorsed popular culture by pulling all the kids out of school to take them to watch movies such as Gone with the Wind, which, Roberts argues, might have encouraged Anne to understand the value of science fiction then dismissed as pulp fiction. Her mother was also active in the League of Women Voters, an extension of the suffrage movement.

Anne's novels celebrate adolescence. Especially since I have an adolescent daughter, I was interested in what Anne read during her own adolescence. Roberts talks of her reading classical authors such as Rudyard Kipling, but also reading female writers such as Caroline Dale Snedeker who wrote about strong, female characters resisting forces that oppress them, using mythological narratives, and bringing history to life. One was The Forgotten Daughter (1929) in which two women abducted from the Isle of Lesbos—one an adult and one a girl—declare that they are lesbians and that no man will ever be their master! Anne was also influenced by Zane Gray's Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) and The Light of the Western Stars (1914), the latter told from a woman's point of view and the...

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