Three brings together in a single volume An Unfinished Woman (1969), Pentimento (1973), and Scoundrel Time (1976)…. Hellman does not … desire to escape the self through flights of language; indeed, she mistrusts the easy transformations of perspective that prose makes possible. As the titles An Unfinished Woman and Pentimento indicate, her acts of retrospection imply that subjective vision has limits, and that these limits must be acknowledged.
The author of Three is to be triply admired: for the character of her prose, which is conversational, terse, and direct; for her willingness to admit uncertainty; and, finally, for her determination to see not only as she once saw, and not only more than she once saw, but to see continuously as age alters or extends her vantage point…. Evidently, in her New Orleans childhood Hellman acquired a Southerner's strong sense of place, for we see clearly the places that have been important to her, from the fig tree by her aunt's boardinghouse, where she "learned to read," to a square in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, to the Pleasantville farm that she shared with Dashiell Hammett. In many ways, Lillian Hellman clarifies the past by continuing to scrutinize it even as it continues to recede; in other and essential ways, however, she allows its outlines to blur.
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