Helen Keller: A Life.

Helen Keller: A Life by Dorothy Herrmann Alfred A. Knopf. 394 pages. $30.00.

I wanted nothing to do with Helen Keller when I was growing up visually impaired.

If I griped about anything, my parents told me that Helen Keller never complained. A teacher once told me that if I were Helen Keller, "You would do your math homework."

But Keller's life and work went far beyond her inspirational, iconic image.

Many of us still think of Keller as the sweet little girl in The Miracle Worker or as the heroic woman who worked tirelessly to help blind people. Few know about the complexity or politics of Keller's life.

This may change because of Dorothy Herrmann's book Helen Keller. As Herrmann notes, "The real Helen Keller did grow up and live a life that was more problematic than her inspiring childhood."

"In her lifetime, Helen was either venerated as a saint or damned as a fraud," Herrmann writes.

But this book helps us understand Keller's contribution to her time by taking us beyond that dichotomy. Like most of us, Keller had her share of conflicts and personality quirks.

Born in 1880, Keller became blind and deaf when she was eighteen months old. Annie Sullivan, visually impaired herself, opened seven-year-old Helen to life by teaching her the meaning of language.

When she was twelve, Keller wrote a story called "The Frost King." She was devastated to learn, after it had been published, that the tale was similar to "The Frost Fairies" by Margaret T. Canby. It's likely that Sullivan had read this story to Keller.

Though Keller denied that she'd plagiarized the work, the charges scarred her for the rest of her life.

Herrmann shows how Keller forged a life for herself at a time when most people with her disabilities would have been prevented from leaving the family home or an institution--let alone going out in public. She earned a degree from Radeliffe College in 1904 and went on to become a writer, a lecturer, a socialist, a vaudeville performer, and an advocate for the blind.

Like many idealistic people, Herrmann informs us, Keller loved humanity, but sometimes found it difficult to love individuals.

Though Keller once described philanthropy as "a tragic apology for wrong conditions," she used her position as chief fundraiser for the American Foundation for the Blind for more than forty years to maintain a very comfortable lifestyle for herself and her assistants. Keller liked the finer things in life. She wore furs and sipped martinis, Herrmann notes.

The FBI kept tabs on her. Her friends included Eugene Debs, Mark Twain, and W.E.B. DuBois. She endorsed birth control long before "polite" society spoke of this subject. She donated $100 to the NAACP in 1916, and spoke out against the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Despite her independence and outspokenness, the attitudes of her family and the time kept Keller from marrying. When she and Peter Fagan, a journalist, fell in love, her mother nixed their marriage plans.

"The puritanical code of late Victorian society demanded that a severely handicapped female, even one who was `the wonder of the nineteenth century,' remain chaste and undefiled," Herrmann writes.

Even today, it's not easy for someone with a disability to find a job, a relationship, or integration into society-particularly if that person is deaf and blind. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than half of disabled people are unemployed. But, as Herrmann points out, things are better now than during Keller's lifetime.

Keller could communicate only with the few people who spelled words into her hand. Now, with the aid of computer technology, people who are deaf and blind can communicate with people throughout the world on the Internet. Today, many more disabled persons are marrying and raising families.

In Keller's time, because of society's prejudice, most disabled people didn't marry or have children. Most women didn't go to college. It was unheard of for a deaf and blind person to get a college degree.

Herrmann depicts in almost heartbreaking detail Keller's desire to be viewed as a full person. She once complained, "It is difficult for me to get a hearing on any subject not connected with my self and my own experience. When I write seriously about the broader aspects of human life, people are apt to laugh and tell me that I know nothing about the practical world."

I wish that Herrmann had devoted a bit more time to Keller's socialist politics and less time musing about Helen's "dark, silent world." But this is a quibble. Herrmann's work should be read by everyone who wants to understand one of the great, least understood women of our time.

Kathi Wolfe is a freelance writer living in Falls Church, Virginia.