In No Word from Winifred, Carolyn Heilbrun addresses many issues raised by the women's movement: the right to choose a lifestyle appropriate to one's own values, the importance of women's friendships, and the increasing interest in women's literature and biography.

This is at least as much a novel of ideas as it is a mystery story, and the two elements are linked by the steps Kate Fansier takes to explore the disappearance of Winifred Ashby, the honorary niece of an English novelist named Charlotte Stanton, with whom Winifred had spent summers in Oxford as a child. Winifred's diary, retrieved from the New England dairy farm where she worked just before her disappearance, speaks to her childhood yearning to be a boy rather than a girl, her love for Oxford, and her chosen isolation in New England as an adult. In the process of filling in the...