A Difficult Woman

February 20, 2012
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. Agent: Zoë Pagnamenta, Zoë Pagnamenta Agency.

April 15, 2012
A hefty examination of one of the 20th century's most socially scrutinized, politically controversial and creatively frustrated writers. Lillian Hellman (1905-1984) would likely have attained celebrity status through her distinctive renown in any one area of her life--for her literary accomplishments as a fearless playwright, for a series of love affairs with notable men or through her affiliations with highly charged political groups and movements. Kessler-Harris (American History/Columbia Univ.; Gendering Labor History, 2006, etc.), the president of the Organization of American Historians, wisely gets the Dashiell Hammett affair out of the way early on and organizes Hellman's life thereafter not chronologically but around emotional, cultural, intellectual and professional themes. The chapters--e.g., "The Writer as Moralist," "An American Jew" and "A Known Communist"--are deftly interconnected, allowing Hellman's story to evolve organically: her experiences as a young woman falling into one doomed relationship after another, reluctant admissions decades later on a psychoanalyst's couch, pithy testimony in the HUAC hearings and blunt outbursts at her own dinner parties. The portrait that emerges is at once riveting and distasteful, with the intelligence of her literary achievements, including The Children's Hour and The Little Foxes, standing in stark contrast to her affairs with married men and pointed declarations during the Spanish War. As with so many artists, it is in the context of Hellman's work that her innermost convictions, fears, foibles and mettle play out, and Kessler-Harris investigates every play opening, ill-advised sexual dalliance and heated debate with equal bite and nuance. Of particular interest is the author's deconstruction of the complex story surrounding Hellman's title character for the 1977 film Julia. A richly layered portrait of a woman whose literary might and sociopolitical daring continue to demand attention.

COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

November 15, 2011

Columbia history professor Kessler-Harris, whose In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America won the Joan Kelly, Philip Taft, Herbert Hoover, and Bancroft prizes, here takes on "difficult woman" Lillian Hellman to rescue her from her own reputation. It's been 25 years since the publication of William Wright's Lillian Hellman, the Image, the Woman; now is time for a reassessment that will grab our imagination.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.