PASSIONATE MINDS

Probing, challenging literary profiles of a dozen 20th-century women whose personal and public concerns encompass sex,

race, politics, and, of course, the roles of women. All of these portraits were originally published in The New Yorker, and they form a pretty eclectic group: Gertrude Stein and Mae West, Margaret Mitchell and Zora Neale Hurston, Ayn Rand and Doris Lessing—as well as Ana‹s Nin, Eudora Welty, Marina Tsvetaeva, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and Olive Schreiner. Art historian Pierpont begins her good-humored and evenhanded examinations of the lives and work of this curious group with the story of South African writer Schreiner, whose bestselling 1883 novel, The Story of an African Farm, offered a bridge between God and Darwin to the spiritually confused. Freedom for women to love and work is also a theme of Schreiner’s writings, and freedom in general—sexual, artistic, emotional, or political—is a concern of most of the women here. But Pierpont pokes beyond feminist concerns, linking biography, literature, history, and culture. Margaret Mitchell’s racism was ill-concealed in Gone With the Wind, for instance, yet she brought to the surface a yearning for romance novels that has yet to go dry; Hannah Arendt criticized the Jews as participating in their own annihilation in The Origins of Totalitarianism; Zora Neale Hurston defied Harlem Renaissance critics who objected to the use of black vernacular, among other things, in her novels. The communist Doris Lessing and the capitalist Ayn Rand make curious book mates, as do the flamboyant Mae West and the "unfailingly courteous" Eudora Welty and others; it must be said that Pierpont does not always pair her subjects together convincingly. Individually, however, these are compelling and provocative essays, offering fresh insights into the lives and works of the

disparate writers. (11 b&w photos)