Difficult Women, the book with which David Plante made his name, is comprised of three portraits of three extraordinary, and difficult, women, and one obliging but rather elusive man, Plante himself. In the first, Plante describes his relationship to the aging Jean Rhys, a no-holds-barred alcoholic who after years of failure has just published The Wide Sargasso Sea and is at last enjoying the recognition she should have long had. Sonia Orwell is Plante's second subject, a suave exploiter and hapless victim of her beauty and social prowess, while the unflappable and extraordinary Germain Greer sails through the final pages of Plante's book, ever ready to set the world, and anyone who thinks otherwise, right.