Rita Mae Brown

Rita Mae Brown (born 28 November 1944 in Hanover, Pennsylvania) is an American novelist, screenwriter, poet, and political activist who burst onto the literary scene in 1973 with Rubyfruit Jungle, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel about a young lesbian that became one of the defining books of the American feminist and gay liberation movements. She has since published over forty books, including a long-running series of cozy mystery novels co-credited to her cat, Sneaky Pie Brown.

Early Life and Activism

Brown was born in Hanover, Pennsylvania, adopted and raised in York, Pennsylvania, and later in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. She attended the University of Florida but was expelled for her civil rights and anti-war activism. She hitchhiked to New York City, where she became involved in the emerging feminist and gay rights movements of the late 1960s.

She was a founding member of several feminist organisations, including the Furies Collective, a lesbian feminist separatist group in Washington, D.C. She published a feminist manifesto, A Plain Brown Rapper (1976), and clashed publicly with Betty Friedan, who attempted to marginalise lesbians within the women’s movement — an effort Brown and others successfully resisted.

Rubyfruit Jungle (1973)

Brown’s debut novel was first published by the small feminist press Daughters, Inc. in 1973 and then picked up by Bantam Books in 1977, becoming a mass-market bestseller that eventually sold over a million copies. The novel follows Molly Bolt — brash, funny, sexually uninhibited, and unapologetically lesbian — from childhood in rural Pennsylvania through adolescence in Florida to young adulthood in New York, where she aspires to be a filmmaker.

The novel’s importance was partly literary and partly political. As a work of fiction, it is lively, funny, and readable — a picaresque in the tradition of Tom Jones, with a heroine whose energy and irreverence carry the reader through a series of comic and dramatic adventures. As a political document, it was revolutionary: it presented a lesbian protagonist who was neither tragic nor conflicted but joyful, confident, and entirely unashamed. In 1973, this was genuinely radical.

Later Novels

In Her Day (1976) explores the relationship between a feminist activist and an older professor. Six of One (1978) is a comic novel set in a small town on the Mason-Dixon Line — the beginning of Brown’s career-long exploration of Southern small-town life. Southern Discomfort (1982) examines race and class in Montgomery, Alabama. High Hearts (1986) is a Civil War novel about a woman who disguises herself as a man to fight alongside her husband.

Sudden Death (1983), a roman à clef about the women’s professional tennis circuit, drew on Brown’s well-publicised relationship with Martina Navratilova and generated considerable tabloid attention.

The Mrs. Murphy Mysteries

Brown’s most commercially successful works are her “Mrs. Murphy” mystery novels — cozy mysteries set in the fictional Virginia town of Crozet, featuring postmistress Mary Minor “Harry” Haristeen and her crime-solving cat, Mrs. Murphy. The first, Wish You Were Here (1990), was co-credited to Brown’s cat Sneaky Pie Brown, and the series has continued for over thirty novels. The books are light, entertaining, and popular with a devoted readership.

Critical Perspective

Brown’s literary reputation rests primarily on Rubyfruit Jungle, which remains one of the essential texts of American feminist and LGBT literature. Her subsequent work has been criticised as uneven — the mysteries are formulaic (by design), and the literary novels have not always matched the energy of the debut. But Rubyfruit Jungle endures as a genuinely important and genuinely entertaining novel — a book that changed lives.

Collecting Brown

Rubyfruit Jungle (1973, Daughters, Inc.) in the original small-press first edition is rare and valuable ($200–$1,000). The Bantam mass-market paperback first edition (1977) is more widely collected. Brown’s mysteries are readily available in first edition.