An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir (Back Bay Books) [Paperback]

Lillian Hellman (Author), Wendy Wasserstein (Contributor)

Book Description

Series: Back Bay Books | Publication Date: June 7, 1999

Caustic, brilliant, uncompromising, accomplished, Lillian Hellman, one writer noted, can "take the tops off bottles with her teeth". Her career as a playwright began in 1938 with The Children's Hour, the first of seven plays that would bring her international attention and praise. Thirty years later, Hellman unleashed her peerless wit and candor on the subject she knew best: herself. An Unfinished Woman is a rich, surprising, emotionally charged portrait of a bygone world -- and of an independent-minded woman coming into her own. Wendy Wasserstein's introduction to this new edition provides a fascinating literary and historical context for reexamining Lillian Hellman's life and achievement.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Hellman didn't pull any punches in this 1969 autobiography in which she reminisces about her unhappy upbringing in New Orleans and her literary relationships, especially that most famous one with master whodunit writer Dashiell Hammett. Though many critics and biographers claim that Hellman invented half of her life stories, these tales do make for interesting reading, so who cares. (LJ 6/15/69)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Back Bay Books; 1st Back Bay pbk. ed edition (June 7, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316352853
• ISBN-13: 978-0316352857
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #471,261 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Literary Memoir and Travelogue, July 5, 1999

By 

Walker E. Rowe III "Walker Elliott Rowe" (Santiago, CHILE) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir (Back Bay Books) (Paperback)

I bought this book after seeing a documentary on Lillian Hellman on PBS. PBS said that Lillian Hellman is the foremost female American playright and movie script writer. She was also sympathetic to or at least a devoted student of the communism of Marx and Engels. During the McArthy era she and her boyfriend, novelist Dashiell Hammett, were forced to testify before the Committee on Un-American Activities.

But to focus on her communist sympathies would be a distraction from the rest of her remarkable life. Lillian does not. This memoir is a fascinating mix of travel essay, character portraits, and a biography of her unorthodox youth split between Louisianna and New York.

The best written chapters are character portraits of her friends Dorothy Parker and Dashiel Hammett. It is here that you can understand her skills as a playright for she probes the actions of each person and seeks to explain why they behaved as they did. Let interesting a chapters where she just inserts portions of her diary in chronological order.

As a Southernor I can understand the relation she had with Sophronia, the black woman who acted as her governess and parent's housekeeper. For in the South the lives of blacks and whites intertwine in a manner that non-Southerners would not understand. Sophronia untangled the problems in Lilians life long after she left the Hellman's employ.

Parts of this memoir reads like Getrude Stein's "The Biography of Alice B. Toklas". There is much name dropping of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Like Hemingway, Lillian joined the fight against facism in Spain. But the Paris-based passages are not so memorable as those of Getrude Stein in part since these literary are art circles were not such a large part of Lillian's life. In fact she preferred the seclusion of her farm to life in the city.

Far more noteworthy is Lillian's description of 6 months in the Soviet Union during World War II as a guest of the Soviet government. Lillian was envied by the regular press corps because she travelled to the front lines while they were restricted to their dreary hotel.

After reading her memoirs, I doubt I will reads her plays. Since Lillian says hardly anything about them I haven't an idea what they are about. Rather I will continue to plow through the Great Books of the Western Canon--a lifelong pursuit for Lillian as well.

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A crisp, dynamic, theatrical, literary memoir., August 27, 2001

By 

Christian Engler (Woburn, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir (Back Bay Books) (Paperback)

A life where no living is done is a life not worth living. Like O'Neil, Shaw, Williams and Isben, Lillian Hellman (1905-1984, scriptwriter, playwrite, social and political activist and critic) wrote some of the most enduring and thought-provoking drama for the theatre in the 20th century, and the above 'proverb' could very easily have been her epitaph. An Unfinished Woman (Winner of the 1969 National Book Award for biography/Autobiography), the first memoir in her autobiographical trilogy (the two others being Pentimento: A Book of Portraits and Scoundrel Time), showcases a woman who had a 'steel rod' for a spine, a woman of stark liberty who would not compromise her beliefs nor truckle in the presence of those political, military and literary higher-uppers (Hemmingway is a case-in-point) whom she encountered who expected a cowering reaction due to their 'clout.' But that was something she never offered, for as Lillian Hellman said of herself when asked the question, "What are you made of, Lily?" Her cool response was, "Pickling spice and nothing nice." This 'confession' of glued-together memories and eloquent journal entries shimmers with quiet, concentrated reflection and introspection. Each chapter gleams and flashes like a beacon, slowly proffering insights into not simply a remarkable life but a frozen portrait of a bygone era - a period of class, dignity, wisdom, self-learning, an endless stream of wonderful things that are presently no more. She hobnobbed with the best and brightest, luminaries like: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway, William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, John Hersey, Averell Harriman, and of course, above them all, her truelove and literary confidant, Dashiell Hammett. As a globe-trotting cultural attache' to Russia, France, Germany, and other European lands, she lived and saw intrigue with those of her like mind. She was on the front lines (or very close to them) during World War II. She witnessed bombed out villages and destroyed lives, all the emotional and physical calamities that the horrors of war can funnel forth, broadcasting them for all to hear and imbibe. She participated (with some trepidation) in the PEN (Poets, Playwrites, Essayists and Editors and Novelists) Center Conference, conversing with intellectuals on the pressing issues of the time, but her reluctance was most unequivocal, for intellectual chitchat can, and for her, did quickly evolve into a bombastic mess on hyperbolic, pretentious proportions. She saw B.S., and she saw truth, not hesitating in the least to speak her mind or to write about it. From her reminiscences of her New Orleans girlhood with her beloved caretaker Sophronia, to her shuffling to New York, to her failed marriage and her father's infidelity, Hellman's life only crescendos. With corrosive verve, 'salty' wit and profound insight, Lillian Hellman lets the past truly come alive. In the end, she showed one and all that she was an 'empowered' woman before many thought that could ever be possible.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I loved this book!, May 23, 2001

By 

Diana J. Dell - See all my reviews

This review is from: An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir (Back Bay Books) (Paperback)

Lillian Hellman is one of the most important American women writers and this, her memoir, is a literary feast--witty, poignant, brash, and cynical; but as Hellman once wrote, "Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth." I love her plays and I loved this book!--Diana Dell, compiler, Memorable Quotations: American Women Writers of the Past.