Lillian Hellman, a popular playwright and bestselling author, was a minor player in American intellectual circles. So why is she still such a divisive figure?

A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman. By Alice Kessler-Harris.

Hellman is an irresistible subject, but time has not been good to her reputation. Her effort to control her legacy appears to have backfired. Once celebrated for her taut writing and devotion to social justice, her image since her death in 1984, aged 79, has curdled into something villainous. Her plays are still performed—particularly “The Little Foxes”, which secured her fame in 1939—but they are often dismissed as moralising melodramas. Her name now tends to invite vitriol about her being a Stalinist and a liar, a woman who preached economic equality while swaddled in mink. She was a hypocritical “bitch with balls”, in the words of Elia Kazan, a film director, who seethed at Hellman's self-righteous take on the McCarthy era.

This is the backdrop of “A Difficult Woman”. Alice Kessler-Harris, an American historian at Columbia University, begins her thoughtful book assuring readers that “it would be folly to try to capture the ‘real' Lillian, whoever that is”. Hellman is too slippery a subject and too unco-operative a source for that. Rather, this biography works to answer the question of why Hellman remains such a divisive figure, “a lightning rod for the anger, fear and passion” that divided Americans during an especially fraught ideological time.

Ambitious, acerbic and direct to the point of rudeness, Hellman was a woman of voracious appetites, the kind of “tough broad” who “can take the tops off bottles with her teeth”, according to a 1941 New Yorker profile. She knew she wasn't a beauty (her first boyfriend said she looked like “a prow head on a whaling ship”), but she bristled with a sexual charisma designed to distract husbands from their wives. Lonely and insecure about her desirability, she found affirmation in affairs and friendships with men.

The most significant of these was with Dashiell Hammett, a famous and flamboyantly alcoholic writer of detective novels, with whom she enjoyed an unconventional romance for 30 years until he died in 1961. Hellman always credited him with teaching her how to write, showing her how to craft distinctive characters with just a few lines of raffish dialogue. In turn Hellman bailed Hammett out of the occasional fix, and tended to his reputation and estate for the rest of her life.

Vehemently anti-fascist, Hellman fought for civil rights and civil liberties, always believing a better future was within reach. She became a labour organiser during the Depression, and travelled to Spain to witness the horrors of its civil war. She flirted with communism in the 1930s, seeing the party as an essential check on fascism in Europe. Problematically, she joined the party after the worst of Moscow's purges and show trials, and even signed a letter declaring her faith in the guilt of the defendants. But her membership was brief, and she later expressed regret for not having understood just how blood-soaked Stalin was.

Amid growing fears about the Soviet menace in the 1950s, Hellman still loudly supported “peaceful coexistence” rather than aggressive containment. Called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1952, she elegantly declared that it was “indecent and dishonourable” to name names in order to save herself, particularly when she did not feel she had done anything wrong. America's repression of communism, she argued, was more insidious than the threat of it. Despite decades of involvement in progressive politics and her public criticism of Stalin's regime, Hellman is still regarded as an “unrepentant Stalinist”.

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. She had the “sense of justice of a very small child”, according to a friend, and she conveyed this moral certainty in her plays. But she was a bit player in intellectual circles, a celebrity whose outspokenness earned her disproportionate attention. So why has Hellman become a symbol for all that went wrong in the ideological battles of the 20th century? Ms Kessler-Harris argues that it may have something to do with the fact that she was a brassy, unattractive and sexually voracious woman who reaped commercial success from “middlebrow” work.

Hellman hardly helped matters by claiming her own moral superiority. In her 1976 memoir, “Scoundrel Time”, she lambasts fellow leftists for not speaking up when innocent Americans were being jailed or ruined by the HUAC witch hunt. Her anger was not directed at the government, but at “the people of my world”, the intellectuals who did nothing to defend America's civil liberties. By placing herself on this righteous pedestal, touting her own bravery in a time of fear, she left herself open to criticism, particularly for her blindness to Stalin's sins. She was also more vulnerable to claims that she twisted the facts to promote her story of personal courage.

But the final nail in the coffin of Hellman's reputation was hammered in 1980, when she decided to go after Mary McCarthy, a novelist and literary critic, for defaming her in a late-night TV interview. Younger, more attractive and intellectually fierce, McCarthy accused Hellman of being a bad and dishonest writer; “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘a(chǎn)nd' and ‘the'.” Hellman sued. The lawsuit lasted for the rest of her life. After years of defending civil liberties and criticising rapacious wealth-seeking, Hellman ended her days seeming like a greedy and vengeful censor.

This is a shame. Hellman may not have been the hero of her reminiscences, but she spent a lifetime believing it was the duty of engaged citizens to fight racism, alleviate poverty and protect civil liberties. She was a role model to feminists in the 1970s, but she despaired that they talked too much about bras and too little about economic opportunity and human rights. She made some foolish choices, but Lillian Hellman was often on the right side of history. Too bad so many of her good ideas have been tossed out with the bad ones.