To Live and Write in California : CALIFORNIA’S DAUGHTER: Gertrude Atherton and Her Times, <i> By Emily Wortis Leider (Stanford University Press: $24.95; 379 pp.)</i>

This is what Henry James said about Gertrude Atherton: “I abominate the woman.” He groaned out loud when he had to write her. Critics like Willa Cather said Atherton wrote for “summer hotel ladies.”

Atherton, who lived to be 91, wrote at least 56 novels and a zillion batty newspaper and magazine articles opining that American women were stronger than American men, that British men were stronger than British women, that San Francisco was a provincial backwater, that Europe was superior (except that sometimes it was inferior).

Atherton adored “Supermen.” She had contempt for Negroes and the poor; she hated Hitler, but she hated weak men the most. Actually, the people who really got on her nerves were other lady novelists: She grieved that people considered Edith Wharton to be a better novelist than she was. And when Mary (“The Land of Little Rain”) Austin suggested that she, Austin, was the greatest living woman writer, Atherton snapped back: “The hell you are, Mary!”

Up until the 1940s, Atherton kept getting books on the best-seller list, regularly beating out “serious” writers like Sinclair Lewis, but few people today remember any of her novels, including the infamous “Black Oxen,” in which a lady far past menopause gets her ovaries X-rayed and turns back into a fiery femme fatale. (Atherton did that; she took the famous Steinach treatment, dropped dozens of hormone pills, may have gotten her face lifted, and at the age of 70 only looked 50. A definite triumph of some kind.)

Why don’t we remember her? Why don’t we read Gertrude Atherton? A good guess would be that it’s for the same reason the Bloomsbury group despised the Victorians, or that second-generation immigrants are ashamed of their parents’ strange ethnic ways. As Californians, we’ve got Atherton as our wacky, uneducated, headstrong literary ancestor, constantly defining for the rest of the world what it was to be “Californian” and embarrassingly out to lunch.

But for women, “writing” women, “modern” women, “new” women, who strive and struggle and worry and finagle, Atherton must still function as a kind of Bogie-Woman-aunt. “Be careful! Don’t go on that talk show and make a damn fool of yourself, or you may end up like your Aunt Gertrude! Don’t turn away from your lump-husband in the night, you’ll end up like Gertrude! Don’t hire baby-sitters so that you can work on your novel, you’ll end up cruel and shallow like Gertrude! Above all, edit! Study! Get serious! Respect men! Take care of your children! Keep a clean house and keep your head down, or you’ll end up like Gertrude!”

Because Atherton couldn’t keep her mouth shut and she was as insecure and vain as she was hard-working. She was essentially running on empty, but by God she kept on running. She’s the direct ancestor of quintessential California women like Jane Fonda, who sat on a North Vietnamese gun but redeemed herself by looking like a movie star. Or Nancy Reagan, who suggested in her book that people disliked her because she could still wear a size 4. Or Judith Krantz, also tres petite, who has a conniption fit when people suggest she may be writing “trash.”

To be thin, to be beautiful, to be “young,” especially when it goes against the nature of things; to deny what you’re doing, to pretend to an importance that in fact you may not possess--these characteristics come down to California women directly from the books and life of Atherton. And the sure wages of this kind of female behavior are the responses that behavior elicits: “I abominate the woman!” (How many men, and somewhat mousier females, have not said or thought that about the women listed above, as well as any other women, even now, who work instead of staying home or push their husbands away in the night, or hire those baby-sitters one time too many, or essay opinions on the Middle East or any other thing on Earth except whether pumpkin pie might be better than mince?)

Let’s pause to say that Atherton, wild wonder that she was, has found a biographer absolutely worthy of her. Here is scholarship of the very best kind: deep, original, affectionate, witty, unobtrusive. Again and again, Emily Wortis Leider tabs Atherton for screeching inconsistency, for plain money-grubbing, for pretending that her granddaughter was her niece, for flirting, for lying, for pushing herself into a society that didn’t want her, and then slamming the door on the people who followed after her:

“Atherton was the kind of feminist who complains about how ugly most other feminists are,” Leider observes dryly, and halfway through this book: “Self-congratulation had been the order of the day, and worldly success the shrine she worshipped at.” But to Leider’s credit, we always know why this happened, how this happened.

Atherton’s father was a business moron, and her mother a narcissistic airhead. There was never enough money. When Gertrude married into the Atherton family at age 19, it was a “smart” move for her: They were part of San Francisco society, Peninsula society, and had Land Grant ties. But her stodgy in-laws disapproved of reading and writing and her husband was both tyrannical and stupid.

Atherton got mad. ( Mad is a word she uses often in her later letters.) The world, perceived, was not fair. As her decade-long marriage proceeded, she became a victim of a strange dynamic even if she could neither describe nor understand it. In our “old” days, a wife-and-mother was submissive to her in-laws, her husband and the laws of biology. A female was meant to carry all that, keep the machinery of the race going. But by the time a woman was allowed any education at all, or any respite from the burden of having one baby a year, a terrible unbalance set in.

Atherton was no Einstein, but she was smarter, in practical ways, than her husband. And somewhere, in this century, or in the last century, there occurred a cosmic moment in many women’s lives when they found “playing dumb” to be intolerable. This explains Atherton’s later veneration of Ambrose Bierce or Sen. James Phelan: She didn’t have to play dumb with them, she was dumber than them, and could act like a decent woman, rather than a screeching virago--an “abomination.”

Poor Mr. Atherton died when Gertrude was 30. She fled to New York, began to write. Her son had died, but she dumped her daughter for three whole years. She fought to be accepted by society and was, provisionally.

She worked like a dray horse but was as vain as a peacock. She disliked physical sex (and had the nerve to say so), so that besides being an “abomination” she was labeled by one of her own doctors as “frigid.” Because the times were changing so quickly, even smart men couldn’t figure out that a woman might prefer getting her name in the paper and going to parties given by Lady Randolph Churchill to staying home, having sex with some guy you don’t like, and nine months later giving birth to a creature you have to take care of for the rest of your life. Atherton must have been frigid. . . .

That goes back to the question of staying “young,” not for a man but for yourself. And having opinions, even if they’re goofy ones, and pushing in when you’re not wanted. And laughing at the poor, because if you got out of poverty, why can’t they?

Fifty-six novels. And we don’t remember one of them. But every time we climb on an Exercycle, or get furious at stuffy New York, or take a birth-control pill, or laugh at some guy because he’s a bonehead, we women are acting off Atherton’s legacy. And every time a put-upon man groans at the demands of yet another strong-minded woman, he has Atherton to blame.

This book transcends biography. It’s a Rosetta stone to the actual everyday way we live now, in America, California, Los Angeles. It’s ludicrous, depressing, euphoric, amazing.