Virginia Gerstenfeld Heinlein was born April 22, 1916, in Brooklyn New York
the daughter of a dentist. She went to the Packer Collegiate Institute, a
college preparatory high school, where she finished in
three-and-a-half years, always on the honor roll. She attended New York University,
majoring in chemistry. She lettered in swimming, diving,
basketball, and field hockey. She also reached national competitive levels in
figure skating, the sport that became her lifelong passion. In the late 1950s,
she served on the U.S. Olympic Committee for Skating. In time, she came to
speak over seven languages, including French, Latin, Italian, and Russian.
Graduating
in 1937, she worked for Quality Bakers as a chemist until 1943, when the WAVES
was formed. She enlisted immediately and was commissioned as a WAVE lieutenant,
serving first at the Bureau of Aeronautics, then at the Naval Air Experimental
Station in Philadelphia in 1944 and 1945. She met Robert
Heinlein there, working as a civilian aviation engineer because the Navy would
not overlook his medical discharge due to tuberculosis in 1934. She served as
his assistant on several classified development projects as a chemist and
aviation test engineer.
After
World War II, she came to Los Angeles to
study for an unfinished doctorate in biochemistry at UCLA. She married Robert
Heinlein in Raton New Mexico in October 1948. Thereafter, the two were inseparable;
those who knew them spoke often of their intense and abiding love for each
other. She became his closest companion, aiding him in his writing, and
traveling the world with him.Virginia
shepherded Robert through two severe near-death illnesses in the seventies
through constant care and love. She took over the business aspects of his
writing career, freeing him to focus on his writing. Together, they made a
special project of organizing local and national blood drives and facilitating
cooperation among all the blood collecting organizations in the world.
Shortly
after his death in 1988, she moved to Florida. She gathered a selection of her husband's letters
in Grumbles from the Grave, printed for the first time his travel memoir Tramp Royale
and political handbook Take Back Your Government (originally titled How
to Be a Politician), and oversaw the restoration of several texts she felt
had been badly edited, including Red Planet, Puppet Masters, and Stranger
in a Strange Land.
Throughout
her life, she loved reading, cooking, gardening, music, and politics. In recent
years, declining eyesight and physical health curtailed some of her favorite
activities, but she began and maintained an active presence on Internet venues
devoted to study of her husband's works, pursuing this new hobby with much
energy.
She
endowed the Robert Anson Heinlein Chair in Aerospace Engineering, established
on August 28, 2001 Annapolis, by a gift of over $2.6 million, in honor of her late
husband, a graduate of the Naval Academy's Class of 1929.
She
also helped to found The Heinlein Society, an educational charity dedicated to
paying forward to generations to come the many Heinlein legacies.
She
also endowed the public library in Robert Heinlein's birthplace of Butler,
Missouri.
Readers
have often remarked on the strength, intelligence, and power of his female
characters; his fictional women were often based on Virginia Heinlein. As
science fiction writer Spider Robinson said, "several of Heinlein's women
bear a striking resemblance to his wife Virginia." Many of Heinlein's
books were dedicated to her. Virginia, or
"Ginny" as she preferred to be called, was his sounding board and
source of ideas; she originated the idea that became Stranger in a Strange Land
She was his first reader and trusted critic. Robert
Heinlein once said she was"smarter, better, and more sensible than I
am." In a 1961 letter, he said, "She is what I feel to be a good
person in the word's simplest and plainest meaning. Which includes lashing out
with her claws on some occasions when others may consider it improper. I don't
give a damn whether Ginny is 'proper' or not; I like her. I like her
values." At the end of one of his later books, Job: A Comedy of
Justice, the final sentence has been read by many as Robert Heinlein's own
tribute to his beloved wife: "Heaven is where Margrethe is."
