David Plante's dazzling portraits of three influential women in the literary world, now back in print for the first time in decades.Difficult Women, the book with which David Plante made his name, presents three portraits—each one of them as detailed, textured, and imposing as the those of Lucian Freud—of three extraordinary, complicated, and, yes, difficult women, while also raising intriguing and in their own way difficult questions about the character and motivations of the keenly and often cruelly observant portraitist himself.An American young man, a novelist, settles in London in the early 70's and pursues the friendship of much older women, who are either themselves literary or have entree to the literary life. It is a given that these women will be complicated, stubborn, strong-willed, and that the relationship between each of them and the novelist will be tricky, even suspect. If this were the 1870's, the circumstances would provide a Jamesian subtext fulfilling, only very slowly, some psychologically unforeseen purpose; but as it is the 1970's, the entire matter is at once laid self-consciously before us, and we are free to decide how much or how little it all means.