Hypothesis I'm formulating

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I'm working on a hypothesis that a certain famous artistic figure had Asperger's. I don't want to be too specific, since it is a scholarly research project i'm working on in the hope of publishing.

What is known about this woman, beyond her professional life, is that she was devoutly religious and died of lupus. She was diagnosed with lupus only a few years after finsihing graduate school and becoming famous, so most of her adult life was under that shadow.

Most of what is known about her childhood comes from others' recollections. It would be nice if, as in my own self-diagnosis, I could point to specific physiological or neurological symptoms associated with Asperger's, or if I could find evidence of stimming. But here's what I have:

1. She did not generally care for socialization or talking. She deeply enjoyed intellectual conversations.
2. She despised social conventions, manners, etc.
3. She was, however, strictly moral and couldn't stand being around people she felt were immoral ( I've read that it is a trait of Asperger's to tend to extreme views, one way or the other, regarding religion and morality)
4. Most of her teachers and former schoolmates recalled her being aloof. They say she didn't like to play with the other kids, and preferred to sit in the yard reading during recess.
5. Many people say that her only "friends" were kids her mother forced her to play with. She did not like outsiders, and, once, when one of her "friends" brought another girl over, our heroine tied that girl to a chair for the whole visit.
6. She had one childhood acquaintance, "Kathy," who insisted that our heroine was normal, well-adjusted and very sociable. OTOH, even Kathy was "forced," according to the biographer to visit our heroine every summer when their family moved. One afternoon when they were teenagers, and Kathy was visiting our heroine, Kathy went out on a date with a local boy. When she got back, our heroine had packed her bags and put them on the stump and asked her to leave, calling her "wayward woman".
7. Our heroine was intensely interested in poultry, from her childhood. She said the highlight of her life was when a film crew came to her home when she was a girl and filmed her chicken that could walk forward and backward. SHe eventually collected various kinds of chickens, turkeys, ducks, and geese from around the world, but she said she only felt complete when she finally obtained some peafowl: she's notorious among scholars for her love of peafowl and extensive knowledge about them, as well as birds in general.
8. In her home ec. class, she was given a project to design an outfit for a baby. Instead, she designed an outfit for a chicken, and brought the chicken into class, wearing it.
9. She shunned gender interaction. She referred to herself as a wallflower who'd rather pursue a Ph.D. than a man. She spent most of her life at all-girls' schools. WHen she *was* in co-ed classes in graduate school, there was some question of whether she lacked interest in the men or the men lacked interest in her. She did go on some unsuccessful blind dates in grad. school, and she had some male "friends" for whom she harbored deep crushes, even after they were married.
10. Some speculate that she was a closet lesbian, but she had many lesbian friends in whom she showed no interest. At least one of her lesbian friends did make an advance and was spurned. She showed absolutely no interest in sexual relationships of any kind.
11. At every level of her life, she did not "fit in" (people with Asperger's tend to not fit in with their own age group). In school, again, she got along better with her teachers than her classmates. In college, her classmates said she spoke on the professors' level, and that her peers never understood her. In graduate school, she finally found people she felt she could relate to. After graduate school, she lived in an artists' colony and couldn't stand the other artists: but she did have a great time talking with the support staff.
12. She was known to fly into rages.

A couple of these descriptions, especially the way the biographer phrases them, read like "smoking guns" to me. I'm just wondering what everyone thinks.

Except that you've posted the unedited version for posterity

ys flannery o'connor if you put pea fowl and lupus into any search engine.
my comments?
AS have a very associative style of thinking, we tend to link things and make conections that others may not.
so we can tend to see ASin most people we observe.
regardless i think your on the right track and good luck with yout research.

Does sound like Flannery O'Connor, but there isn't a single characteristic there that couldn't be explained in terms of other problems. What fascinates me is that so many people see a few characteristics of someone they admire or are interested in, and try to locate them on the spectrum. I wonder if it's some kind of halo effect at work, if the researcher is on the spectrum. Or an attempt to explain someone's talent in terms of... from the desire to prove that autism/asperger's are actually responsible for the talent.

Not criticizing -- just wondering.

Yeah, I was worried when I said "lupus" and peacock, but I was too tired to make up terms

I understand about "reading your own problems into someone else," but what struck me was when I was reading a student's term paper this past spring, and he quoted the anecdotes from her teachers and classmates, which got me to thinking about how that's what Asperger originally described: kids who sat at recess reading or engaging in imaginary play instead of playing with the other kids. It's kind of like with Marfan: Marfan merely described a kid with really long limbs and digits. Later on, they started finding people with the body structure Marfan described who also had vision and heart problems, etc.

I just wish I could find a real "smoking gun".