For nine years debate raged over who was behind the mysterious byline of James Tiptree, Jr., until in 1977 it was revealed that 'he' was really Alice B. Sheldon
Throughout the 1970s debate raged through the science fiction world over who was behind the byline of James Tiptree, Jr.
While Tiptree wrote stories sympathetic to women and feminism - such as the acclaimed "The Women That Men Don't See" (1973) when a woman and her daughter prefer to be abducted by aliens than live in the world of men - 'he' did so in a very masculine style. Robert Silverberg wrote: "It has been suggested to me that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing."
In 1977 it was revealed that 'he' was really Alice B. Sheldon, a sixty-one year old experimental psychologist. But the fact that an apparently male writer was really a woman was actually one of the less strange aspects of Alli Sheldon's life.
Born in 1915 to Herbert and Mary Bradley, scions of Chicago society, Alli's life was shaped by her formative years: her mother miscarried three times, while a fourth sister died at just one day old. All Herbert and Mary's love was poured into Alice, and she felt overwhelmed.
Alli's life was to be one long competition with her bright and vivacious Mother, who became a noted author with a string of lightweight but popular stories in the Saturday Evening Post, further fuelling Alice's feelings of inferiority.
The other formative influence was the succession of Big Game Hunts to Africa that her parents took her on when she was a child, an experience that was to leave her with a life-long fascination with death.
Alice grew up at a time when women had supposedly been enfranchised, but unless they were incredibly single-minded, talented or lucky, they were still expected to pursue a career only while they were single.
Pressurized into 'having a season,' with no career plan, the result of a debut of a young, beautiful, highly-sexed but uncertain woman into society was inevitable; Alice eloped with the first young man she met. Marriage, an early pregnancy and abortion, and finally divorce followed.
It took a war in which Alli came up again and again against the institutionalised misogyny of society, before she met her second husband, 'Ting' Sheldon. After the war, they tried their hand at chicken farming, before joining the CIA in the 1950s. Alli lasted only three years before suffering another of the emotional crises that plagued her throughout her life. It was in an effort to understand this perennial depression that led Alli to study and become a doctor in experimental psychology.
Afterwards Alli began to write and publish the taut, fast-paced -- above-all masculine -- stories that shook the SF world. For almost a decade Tiptree provided an outlet for Sheldon to write the things that she wanted to say, but as a woman and someone who wanted to avoid hurting those she loved, couldn't.
After her cover was blown, Alli went into a long decline, from which she never really recovered. When Ting was eighty-four, blind and going deaf, she rang an attorney: "I have slain Ting by my own hand and I'm about to take my own life."
Phillips is unflinchingly honest and even-handed in her evaluation of a deeply disturbed woman, who in the end could not cope with this world, although she held onto life for as long as she could.
This biography was rightly picked as one of the notable books of the year by the American Library Association, and as one of the Best Books of the Year by the (London) Times Literary Supplement. It is no less than it deserves.
