A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman
Alice Kessler-Harris
A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman
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.
2.9 out of 5 based on 6 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Biography, Literary Studies & Criticism |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
448 |
| RRP |
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| Date of Publication |
June 2012 |
| ISBN |
978-1596913639 |
| Publisher |
Bloomsbury |
| |
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.
Reviews
The Economist
The Economist
“[A] thoughtful book … Ms Kessler-Harris largely defends Hellman against her harshest critics by placing her and her choices — such as her defence of communism and her refusal to embrace feminism — in the context of her times. Hellman's politics were often naive, but she was hardly alone.”
14/08/2012
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The Washington Post
Jonathan Yardley
“[A] friendly if far from uncritical biography … Her posthumous reputation is not without justification. Yet Kessler-Harris — a highly regarded historian who teaches history at Columbia University — sees Hellman as having been nurtured from childhood in “lessons of honesty, integrity, justice, and decency,” concepts that “remained the heart and soul of American culture and of the life she would construct for herself.” She sees Hellman as a principled moralist who could not resist the pulpit”
04/05/2012
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The Sunday Times
Daisy Goodwin
“Kessler-Harris’s book is not a conventional biography; as a gender historian her aim is to disentangle Hellman’s real achievements from the myth and misinformation (many of them self-created) that surround her reputation. The title is deliberate. Hellman’s many contradictions are difficult — she was a Stalinist who believed in free speech, a millionaire who faked her insurance claims, a woman who fought for truth but wrote memoirs based on lies, a jolie laide who got laid a lot. Of course, there are plenty of male playwrights who have had some pretty tricky episodes in their lives, but nobody would write a book calling any of them “a difficult man”. That, though, is Kessler-Harris’s point.”
17/06/2012
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The Independent
Lesley McDowell
“… Hellman's fondness for a moral tone in her work made her an easy target for those looking for flaws in her own behaviour. Kessler-Harris defends her well, but the structure of her biography, while it works hard to exonerate her subject, makes it difficult for us to get close to, and thus sympathise with, Lillian Hellman herself.”
07/07/2012
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The New York Times
Donna Rifkind
“[The author's] soothing excuses for Hellman’s less laudatory behavior defuse its influence and desensitize its sting, in each case obfuscating instead of clarifying the controversies … Nor does the author definitively prove her assertion that Hellman’s reputation has sunk completely into a swamp of “negative mythology.” Yes, her reputation has suffered as more and more evidence of her political naïveté and her dissembling has emerged. Yet her simplistic romanticizing of the radical politics of the 1930s through the 1950s in America has come to be widely accepted as truth, as has her status as the heroine of the less-than-ennobling HUAC proceedings. The realities, as always, are ever so much more complicated. To explain away those realities as the impulses of ordinary folk is to misrepresent Hellman’s legacy and to dissatisfy both her enemies and her friends.”
08/06/2012
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The Spectator
Sam Leith
“... it’s great to see a version of Hellman’s story that, without ignoring her faults, celebrates the extraordinary courage and doggedness she showed in championing civil liberties under Joe McCarthy. The story’s appeal, though, barely survives its telling. The prose is terribly stodgy ... The sense of Hellman as a writer, too, which should surely be front and centre, is barely there: play after play, for instance, is dispatched with a dutiful précis of the plot followed by a two- or three-page pile-up of quotations from reviews. This is a shame: where we are allowed to hear Hellman’s own voice it is alive and affecting.”
23/06/2012
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