DURING the great performance that was her life, Lillian Hellman always addressed the 20th century from center stage. While she defended many causes - justice, loyalty, American civil liberties, anti-fascism and Soviet-style communism among them - what she represented most staunchly was herself, and what she believed in most fiercely was her own unassailability.

She was first and last a dramatist, with a genius for the concise phrase and the provocative gesture. Shrewd plotting and a talent for dialogue were hallmarks of the hugely successful plays, movies and memoirs she wrote. But two crystalline expressions of her own life's high drama are more memorable than any story she ever spun: her pithy rebuke to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1952 ("I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions") and the 1976 Blackglama advertisement for which she posed, enrobed in mink, her 71-year-old face alight with both amusement and confrontation. From her earliest days she sought the spotlight. Once it was on her, she basked in it until the end. Her friend Richard de Combray commented that when she died in 1984 at age 79, "she wanted to pull all the scenery down with her."

"To read Hellman, even to read about her, is to start an argument," one of her biographers has noted. Complex and wide-ranging, these arguments have their roots in the 1930s and continue in our time. They fall roughly into a couple of categories. First is the condemnation of Hellman's insufficiently recanted devotion to Stalinism.

Second are accusations that she fabricated major parts of her best-selling memoirs, which ignited a debate about the ethics of fictionalizing the truth that continues, with les affaires Frey, D'Agata and Daisey, to smolder today. In every arena and on every count, Hellman vigorously defended herself, aided by her many friends and admirers. As that same biographer put it, "She had to be not only right but victorious."

Unsanctioned accounts

Always the challenger, Hellman did her best to thwart all unsanctioned accounts of her life. She forbade her friends to talk to writers and destroyed many of her personal letters. Nonetheless, a half-dozen biographies have been published since her death.

Into this circle enters Alice Kessler-Harris, a Columbia University professor who has spent a distinguished career studying American gender and labor history. Deeply impressed, as so many readers were, by Hellman's memoirs when she first read them in the 1960s and 1970s, Kessler-Harris wonders how such a venerated figure can have fallen so far out of favor as to be widely perceived today as "the archetype of hypocrisy, the quintessential liar, the embodiment of ugliness."

Instead of probing inside Hellman's character for answers, Kessler-Harris takes a historian's perspective, searching outside "by thinking through her relationship to the 20th century." She explains: "I seek not only to explore how the world in which Hellman lived shaped the choices she made, but to ask how the life she lived illuminates the world she confronted ... I ask as well how a changing political environment influences popular perceptions of her life." The book is thus not so much a traditional biography as a series of biographical reflections divided into themes: Hellman as Southerner, Jew, woman, playwright, wage earner, radical, moralist and accused liar.

The tension between author and subject makes for some interesting reading, as Kessler-Harris struggles, as historians do, to subsume her leading lady into a series of social, political and economic contexts, while Hellman - never one to be muscled off a podium - noisily resists. Kessler-Harris is most convincing when she shows Hellman in opposition to her milieu.

Lonely childhood

We see how much an outsider Hellman was from the beginning, during a lonely childhood in which she shuttled back and forth between New Orleans and New York. In the South she benefited from her hometown's freewheeling diversity, untouched by anti-Semitism and molded by the egalitarian moral code of Sophronia, her black nurse. In Manhattan, as a shabby interloper among her mother's wealthy relatives, she began a lifelong obsession with money as a means of control.

In fact, the book's most incisive chapter, and the most moving in its way, is "A Self-Made Woman," which recounts Hellman's financial history. Again, it's as an anomaly that Hellman stands in relation to her era: an unmarried woman who made serious money from her outstanding work on Broadway and in Hollywood and managed to parlay that fortune into a mini-empire of smart real estate investments. Celebrated by the women's movement, Hellman refused to call herself a feminist, and her ardent protection of her own rights and royalties was denounced as haggling and penny-pinching. Yet Kessler-Harris makes an affecting case for the difficulty of Hellman's solo achievement. "In the end," she writes, "money was not simply a way of sustaining herself, but a way of convincing the world that she mattered."

The author is much less persuasive, though, when she tries to blend Hellman smoothly into the context of the endlessly complicated 20th century. Of Hellman's tricky anti-Zionism, Kessler-Harris assures us that Hellman was "neither the first nor the only" person accused of being a self-hating Jew; her 1938 signature on a letter supporting the Moscow purge trials and her subsequent failure to apologize are, in light of so many others' equivalent behavior, not "defensible" but "understandable." These and other soothing excuses for Hellman's less laudatory behavior defuse its influence and desensitize its sting, obfuscating instead of clarifying the controversies.

Throughout the book, Kessler-Harris tries to explain what we can learn from Hellman about ourselves, the way she provided "a sense of how myriad ordinary folk made difficult choices," how she serves as "a Rorschach test" and "a lightning rod" for our angers and fears. Yet if we've learned one thing only about Hellman, it's that she was surely not ordinary folk, no passive receiver of unpredictable rough weather. She was not a lightning rod. She was the lightning.

Nor does the author definitively prove her assertion that Hellman's reputation has sunk completely into a swamp of "negative mythology." Yes, her reputation has suffered as more and more evidence of her political naivete and her dissembling has emerged. Yet her simplistic romanticizing of the radical politics of the 1930s through the 1950s in America has come to be widely accepted as truth, as has her status as the heroine of the less-than-ennobling HUAC proceedings. The realities, as always, are ever so much more complicated. To explain away those realities as the impulses of ordinary folk is to misrepresent Hellman's legacy and to dissatisfy both her enemies and her friends.