A Difficult Woman
The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Lillian Hellman was a giant of twentieth-century letters and a groundbreaking figure as one of the most successful female playwrights on Broadway. Yet the author of The Little Foxes and Toys in the Attic is today remembered more as a toxic, bitter survivor and literary fabulist, the woman of whom Mary McCarthy said, "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'" In A Difficult Woman, renowned historian Alice
Kessler-Harris undertakes a feat few would dare to attempt: a reclamation of a combative, controversial woman who straddled so many political and cultural fault lines of her time.
Kessler-Harris renders Hellman's feisty wit and personality in all of its contradictions: as a non-Jewish Jew, a displaced Southerner, a passionate political voice without a party, an artist immersed in commerce, a sexually free woman who scorned much of the women's movement, a loyal friend whose trust was often betrayed, and a writer of memoirs who repeatedly questioned the possibility of achieving truth and doubted her memory.
Hellman was a writer whose plays spoke the language of morality yet whose achievements foundered on accusations of mendacity. Above all else, she was a woman who made her way in a man's world. Kessler-Harris has crafted a nuanced life of Hellman, empathetic yet unsparing, that situates her in the varied contexts in which she moved, from New Orleans to Broadway to the hearing room of HUAC. A Difficut Woman is a major work of literary and intellectual history. This will be one of the most reviewed, and most acclaimed, books of 2012.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kessler-Harris examines the life of Lillian Hellman to understand why the bestselling author and playwright is both celebrated and reviled a quarter-century after her death. The rich, predatory Southern family in Hellman's most famous play, The Little Foxes, echoes her mother's, and her feeling of being a poor relative fed into a lifelong insecurity even after she achieved success. Accused of being a self-hating Jew and an "unrepentant Stalinist," Hellman challenged traditional women's roles in her writing career and sexual liaisons with alcoholic, married Dashiell Hammett and many others, but was skeptical about women's liberation, refusing to be identified with feminist causes. She died in the midst of a scandalous lawsuit accusing her of stealing the life story of Muriel Gardiner a WWII resistance fighter in her memoir Pentimento, the basis for the acclaimed film Julia. By grounding Hellman in the multifaceted, politically splintered America of her time, Columbia history professor Kessler-Harris (Out to Work) wonders if the tempestuous, demanding, often rude and vindictive woman might have been judged differently had she not been female, Jewish, and a displaced Southerner who appealed to middlebrows. Although she perhaps lets Hellman off the hook too much, Kessler-Harris offers a nuanced, fair-minded, and engrossing portrait of a controversial but indelible 20th-century personality. Photos.
