Great Dames

"In Great Dames, Marie Benner introduces us to a pantheon of women whose lives are both gloriously individual and yet somehow universal. Her subjects range from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who found happiness in her last decade, to Constance Baker Motley, who argued Brown versus the Board of Education before the United States Supreme Court, to Luise Rainer, who won two Academy Awards by age thirty, then fled Hollywood for good. We meet Kitty Carlisle Hart, a professional charmer and tireless advocate of the arts, and Diana Trilling, the intellectual's intellectual, who published her final,…