Rita Mae Brown

Rita Mae Brown (born in Hanover, Pennsylvania, in 1944) is an American novelist, poet and screenwriter associated with lesbian feminism. She is known for a large body of work in two main areas: the women's writing of the 1970s and the mystery novel.

She was raised by relatives of her birth mother in York and later in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In 1964 the University of Florida expelled her for taking part in the civil rights movement. She moved to New York, where she studied at New York University and became interested in film and politics. There she joined the gay liberation and feminist movements. Working inside the National Organization for Women, she argued for the place of lesbians in the movement, and she resigned in 1970 after remarks by Betty Friedan. In the early 1970s she was a founding member of The Furies Collective, a separatist group that held heterosexuality to be the root of oppression, although she soon moved away from it.

Her first novel, Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), was published by a feminist press. It became a classic, with a comic, picaresque tone that reviewers likened to Mark Twain. She afterwards alternated fiction with poetry, memoir and screenwriting. Her recurring themes include the American South, female friendship, class and fox hunting. From 1990 she wrote a long series of mysteries starring a cat, Mrs. Murphy, written together with her real cat, Sneaky Pie Brown. As a screenwriter, her best-known work is the script for The Slumber Party Massacre (1982), a parody of the slasher film that the producers ended up playing straight. She was nominated for an Emmy the same year.

Her legacy lies mainly in spreading lesbian and feminist literature at a time when mainstream publishers paid little attention to these voices. In 2015 she received the Pioneer Award for lifetime achievement at the Lambda Literary Awards. Brown rejects the label of 'lesbian writer', yet her work remains a reference for readers who sought a space of their own in literature.