By the time she was ten years old, Alice Bradley had seen up close two dead bodies lashed to posts on a trail in the Belgian Congo. She’d lain awake in a tent listening to the screams of a man being killed and slept with the formaldehyde-soaked remains of a young gorilla beneath her cot. She’d accompanied her parents on three excursions to Africa and been described in the New York Times as the “First White Child Ever Seen by the Pigmy Tribes.” She’d watched her parents prepare for a lion hunt and longed for a gun of her own.
Tiptree became Alice’s mouthpiece, a workable if flawed strategy for expressing ideas and passions that didn’t fit the scripts available to women of her time. Her writing under the alias received multiple Hugo and Nebula awards, and four years after her death in 1987, two science fiction writers, Karen Fowler and Pat Murphy, launched the Tiptree Award in her memory, recognizing works that “explore and expand gender.” Mainstream literary writers such as Aimee Bender, Jonathan Lethem, and Salman Rushdie have been honored alongside sci-fi heavyweights Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel Delany, and Nalo Hopkinson.
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In the process of analyzing the full scope of Alice’s life, Phillips also exhumes Mary Bradley, who died in 1976 in the Hyde Park apartment where she’d lived for more than 60 years. The biographer believes it was Alice’s relationship with her mother that gives the story a sense of continuity: with each new career, each move away from Chicago, Alice was driving yet another wedge between herself and Mary, whom she nevertheless admired a great deal and never stopped measuring herself against. Her desire to prove herself, the book argues, may have prevented Alice from ever being able to fully integrate the parts of her identity–sexuality chief among them–that didn’t fit the Bradley mold.
Much like her daughter, Mary was a woman divided; unlike her, she seems to have been comfortable with the balancing act. A working writer with a solid reputation at a time when women were expected not to have aspirations beyond the domestic, she was also a mother, a socialite, and a consummate hostess. “She wanted to be a mother and an adventure heroine both, to shoot lions and raise a daughter at the same time,” Phillips writes. “There was pressure on her not to do this.” When the Bradleys announced plans to go to Africa with Carl Akeley, a family friend and a hunter and naturalist who worked for the American Museum of Natural History, Phillips notes, “editorials cast doubt on Mary’s fitness as a mother or suggested that Akeley was taking the women along as decoys to attract male gorillas.”
On December 20, 1934, when she was 19, Alice made her debut at a tea attended by more than 400 guests. At a celebratory formal dance on Christmas Eve, she met a stepson of Cyrus McCormick Jr. and eloped with him several days later, an act that scandalized her parents and made the Tribune’s front page. The couple moved to California, then Greenwich Village. Their ultimately disastrous partnership lasted six years, during which time Alice had an abortion and several affairs. In the late 1930s she painted, wrote art criticism for the Chicago Sun, and–with money from her first and only sale of artwork, a nude self-portrait–bought the gun she’d always coveted, a Fox CE double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun. As it turned out, she was a crack shot.
The rigor and challenge of academic pursuit suited Alice, but during the final stages of her dissertation something else began to take root in her mind. She started directing more and more energy into writing fiction, and in 1967 sent several short stories out to magazines like Fantastic and Galaxy under the moniker James Tiptree Jr. The name Tiptree came from a jar of jam Alice had spied at a grocery store; she picked the first name, Ting suggested the junior. (In 1972 Alice invented a female persona, Raccoona Sheldon, under which she wrote stories she thought were more feminine, with characters who were defined by their empathic urges. Raccoona’s work was never as well received as Tiptree’s, though a horror novella called “The Screwfly Solution” did win a Nebula.)
Tiptree’s literary reputation skyrocketed. In a gushing 1969 acceptance letter Harlan Ellison, then editing an anthology called Again, Dangerous Visions, wrote, “You are the single most important new writer in science fiction today. Nobody touches you!…I am so fucking destructed by what you’ve allowed me to read, I don’t know how to say thank you.” The author’s mystique only stoked the buzz traveling through the tight-knit science fiction community. At a convention in 1974, a false rumor that Tiptree was lurking spread like a virus. A few readers speculated that he might actually be a woman; others concluded that his prose was distinctly masculine. Early on a fan dropped by the Sheldon home in McLean, Virginia; Alice told him he was mistaken, that no man named Tiptree lived there. After that she opened a post office box.
