People remain fascinated by her love affairs, her thirty-year relationship with the detective fiction writer Dashiell Hammett, and her visits to Spain during its civil war and to Russia during World War II."--BOOK JACKET.

Length: 3 acts.

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.

Introduction / Mark W. Estrin -- The dramaturgy of blackmail in the Ibsenite Hellman / Jacob H. Adler -- Miss Hellman's two sisters / Jacob H. Adler -- The autumn garden : mechanics and dialectics / Marvin Felheim -- The dramatic adaptations of Lillian Hellman / Doris Fleischer and Leonard Fleischer -- The lark, translation vs. adaptation : a case history / Henry W. Knepler -- "Good and evil" in Lillian Hellman's The children's hour / Philip M. Armato -- Bohemia bumps into Calvin : the deception of passivity in Lillian Hellman's drama / Mary Lynn Broe -- Lillian Hellman's American political theater : the thirties and beyond / Timothy J. Wiles -- Establishing the woman and constructing a narrative in Lillian Hellman's memoirs / Pamela S. Bromberg.

THE STORY: In the words of New York Post : Miss Hellman is contemplating the meaning of middle age to an assorted group of people gathered together in a summer home... All of them are in one way or another frustrated and unhappy. Most of them

In this widely praised follow-up to her National Book Award-winning first volume of memoirs, An Unfinished Woman, the legendary playwright Lillian Hellman looks back at some of the people who, wittingly or unwittingly, exerted profound influence on her development as a woman and a writer. The portraits include Hellman's recollection of a lifelong friendship that began in childhood, reminiscences that formed the basis of the Academy Award-winning film Julia.

A serious play about two women who run a school for girls.