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.

Hellman knows there are odd blanknesses in the images she presents in Three…. [These] occur whenever emotions rendered forcefully are then denied or dismissively summarized by conclusions that cannot account for them. Of course, it is a virtue in Lillian Hellman that, despite the evasive nature of "truth," she intends to divide right from wrong, then from now, herself from others. Unfortunately, since simple virtues do not reside in complex personalities, Hellman's success and her failure as an observer have the same origin; for her otherwise admirable determination to maintain strong lines of judgment causes her at times to draw those lines in the wrong places. She is then forced into a hasty conclusiveness that belies the richness of her observations. (pp. 937-38)

[Repeated] discrepancy between rich feeling and impoverished explanation splits Hellman's self-portrait and mars her portraits of others. Details, events, characteristics, and emotions emerge vividly—then terminate suddenly in undersized conclusions. So, in Pentimento, several major characters exceed the frames set about them. (p. 939)

Hellman's insistent rush to judgment is often perplexing and, for her readers, disappointing. Important experiences of pain, disorder, and chaos are no sooner displayed than they are locked away again, like gifts simultaneously given and withdrawn. Perhaps Hellman believes that she intentionally withholds interpretations in gestures of privacy or discretion. But her style of withdrawal, an abrupt imposition of judgment, suggests that … she does not comfortably distinguish between teller and tale. (p. 940)