The Children's Hour

Alice Griffin and Geraldine Thorsten (Essay Date 1999)

SOURCE: Griffin, Alice, and Geraldine Thorsten. "The Children's Hour. "In Understanding Lillian Hellman, pp. 27-38. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Griffin and Thorsten discuss the moral implications of The Children's Hour.

"This is not really a play about lesbianism, but about a lie," said Lillian Hellman, describing The Children's Hour to a reporter. "The bigger the lie, the better, as always."¹ Opening on Broadway on 20 November 1934, the play centers upon two young women who open a school for girls and are destroyed when a malicious student charges them with lesbianism. By emphasizing the characters of Karen Wright and Martha Dobie and developing action that is as believable as it is theatrical, Hellman drove home her serious theme and achieved, at the age of twenty-nine, an immediate hit that would...