Gerlinde Obermeir

Gerlinde Obermeir (1942–1984) was an Austrian feminist writer known for her critiques on mental health care.

She wrote I Will Not and San Francisco, of Course (or Positively San Francisco as she herself translated the title).^[1]^[2]

Obermeir has been credited by some critics with mystical insights in her writing. This perhaps makes too much of a visit to India. In 1976 she spent three weeks in India with Swami Paramananda Saraswati. This visit is detailed in Malachi O'Doherty's memoir, I Was A Teenage Catholic. It seems more appropriate to read her explorations of madness as relating to a celebration of anarchic thinking than as grounded in Eastern religion.

She died by suicide in her early forties in Vienna in 1984.

References

^ Hempel, Nele (2002). "Review of Women's Words, Women's Works: An Anthology of Contemporary Austrian Plays by Women". Modern Austrian Literature. 35 (1/2): 117–119. ISSN 0026-7503. JSTOR 24649158.
^ Modern Austrian Literature. State University of New York at Binghamton. 2003. pp. 117–118.