SOURCE: Hart, Jeffrey. “A Lost Lady.” New Criterion 20, no. 5 (January 2002): 65-8.

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.”

This is an extraordinary book [When Men Were the Only Models We Had], I am relieved to say. If Mr. Kurtz had kicked free of the earth, as Conrad wrote, the Columbia English professor Carolyn Heilbrun has kicked free at least from common sense and immensely shared human experience. The “woman's movement,” she tells us, struck her as an overwhelming and liberating development. She appears here to be interested in absolutely nothing except the situation of women as she sees it. I called this book extraordinary, not intending that as a celebration. If the emotions and ideas that inform it came to...