The novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick is one of contemporary America's most brilliant writers, and Seduction and Betrayal, in which she considers the careers of women writers as well as the larger question of the presence of women in literature, is her most passionate and concentrated work of criticism. A gallery of unforgettable portraits--of Virginia Woolf and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Carlyle--as well as a provocative reading of such works as Wuthering Heights, Hedda Gabler, and the poems of Sylvia Plath, Seduction and Betrayal is a virtuoso performance, a major writer's reckoning with the relations between men and women, women and writing, writing and life.

Seduction and betrayal: Women and literature

HARDWICK, ELIZABETH

Literature & Fiction

Weidenfeld and Nicolson

Sleepless Nights

Littlehampton Book Services Ltd.

Collected recent essays by the acclaimed novelist-critic range over a broad spectrum, offering fresh and sharply focused appraisals of life and art

Bartleby in Manhattan, and other essays

Vintage Books

The correspondence between one of the most famous couples of twentieth-century literature The Dolphin Letters offers an unprecedented portrait of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick during the last seven years of Lowell’s life (1970 to 1977), a time of personal crisis and creative innovation for both writers. Centered on the letters they exchanged with each other and with other members of their circle―writers, intellectuals, friends, and publishers, including Elizabeth Bishop, Caroline Blackwood, Mary McCarthy, and Adrienne Rich―the book has the narrative sweep of a novel, telling the story of the dramatic breakup of their twenty-one-year marriage and their extraordinary, but late, reconciliation.
Lowell’s controversial sonnet-sequence The Dolphin (for which he used Hardwick’s letters as a source) and his last book, Day by Day, were written during this period, as were Hardwick’s influential books Seduction and Betrayal: Essays on Women in Literature and Sleepless Nights: A Novel. Lowell and Hardwick are acutely intelligent observers of marriages, children, and friends, and of the feelings that their personal crises gave rise to.
The Dolphin Letters, masterfully edited by Saskia Hamilton, is a debate about the limits of art―what occasions a work of art, what moral and artistic license artists have to make use of their lives as material, what formal innovations such debates give rise to. The crisis of Lowell’s The Dolphin was profoundly affecting to everyone surrounding him, and Bishop’s warning to Lowell―“art just isn’t worth that much”―haunts.

The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle

Biographies & Memoirs

LOWELL, ROBERT

Arts & Literature

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

About the Author\nElizabeth Hardwick (1915-2007) was a literary critic, a novelist, and one of the founders of The New York Review of Books. She is the author of Sleepless Nights and two other novels, a biography of Herman Melville, and four collections of essays, including Seduction and Betrayal, a study of women in literature.\nRobert Lowell (1917-1977) was the renowned and pathbreaking author of many books of poetry, including Life Studies (FSG, 1959), For the Union Dead (FSG, 1964), and Day by Day (FSG, 1977).\nSaskia Hamilton is the author of several books of poetry, including Corridor, named one of the best poetry books of 2014 by The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review. She is the editor of The Letters of Robert Lowell and coeditor of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. She teaches at Barnard College.\nThe correspondence between one of the most famous couples of twentieth-century literature\nThe Dolphin Letters offers an unprecedented portrait of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick during the last seven years of Lowell’s life (1970 to 1977), a time of personal crisis and creative innovation for both writers. Centered on the letters they exchanged with each other and with other members of their circle―writers, intellectuals, friends, and publishers, including Elizabeth Bishop, Caroline Blackwood, Mary McCarthy, and Adrienne Rich―the book has the narrative sweep of a novel, telling the story of the dramatic breakup of their twenty-one-year marriage and their extraordinary, but late, reconciliation.\nLowell’s controversial sonnet-sequence The Dolphin (for which he used Hardwick’s letters as a source) and his last book, Day by Day, were written during this period, as were Hardwick’s influential books Seduction and Betrayal: Essays on Women in Literature and Sleepless Nights: A Novel. Lowell and Hardwick are acutely intelligent observers of marriages, children, and friends, and of the feelings that their personal crises gave rise to.\nThe Dolphin Letters, masterfully edited by Saskia Hamilton, is a debate about the limits of art―what occasions a work of art, what moral and artistic license artists have to make use of their lives as material, what formal innovations such debates give rise to. The crisis of Lowell’s The Dolphin was profoundly affecting to everyone surrounding him, and Bishop’s warning to Lowell―“art just isn’t worth that much”―haunts.

Essays & Correspondence

A View of My Own: Essays in Literature and Society

A View Of My Own: Essays in Literature and Society

United States

Octagon Books

It is only in a country where newness and change and brevity of tenure are the common substance of life," wrote Henry James, "that the fact of one's ancestors having lived for a hundred and seventy years in a single spot would become an element of one's morality." Newness and rootedness are the twin poles of Sight-Readings, Elizabeth Hardwick's brilliant new collection of essays. (Her first, Seduction and Betrayal, was nominated for the National Book Award.) Hardwick's focus here is on American writers, at home and abroad, and especially women, as writers and as characters: Edith Wharton, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Katherine Anne Porter, and Joan Didion, among others. In sections on Old New York, Americans Abroad, and Fictions of America, Hardwick considers writers and their landscapes, real and imagined. Her essays on Edith Wharton and Henry James illuminate aspects of their inventions of New York. From there she takes us to the Paris of Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes, into the hermetic world of Boston Transcendentalism, and on to the suburbs of John Cheever, the America of Philip Roth and John Updike, and the restless expanses of Richard Ford and the Prairie poets. Elizabeth Hardwick has achieved a permanent place in American letters for her sharp and elegant criticism. Her essays on American writers are them-selves a work of literature.

Sight-Readings: American Fictions

Random House]

"Just as Edwin Denby, Clement Greenburg, and Pauline Kael transformed the nature of criticism in the fields of dance, art, and film, respectively, Hardwick has redefined the possibilities of the literary essay." --The New Yorker A brilliant tour of a century American writers, from the novels of Melville, Wharton and James to the fictions of Margaret Fuller, Sylvia Plath and Norman Mailer. Twenty-five years ago, Elizabeth Hardwick's now classic essay "Seduction and Betrayal" helped pioneer the study of women in fiction, both as writers and as characters. American Fictions gathers fro the first time Hardwick's portraits of America's greatest writers. Many of these pieces double as individual reminiscences about close friends, including Mary McCarthy, Katherine Anne Porter and Edmund Wilson. Hardwick has achieved a permanent place in American letters for her sharp and elegant style. Her essays are themselves a work of literature.

American Fictions

Modern Library

Seduction and betrayal;: Women and literature

Politics & Social Sciences

Women's Studies

In Sleepless Nights a woman looks back on her lifeâ€”the parade of people, the shifting background of placeâ€”and assembles a scrapbook of memories, reflections, portraits, letters, wishes, and dreams. An inspired fusion of fact and invention, this beautifully realized, hard-bitten, lyrical book is not only Elizabeth Hardwick's finest fiction but one of the outstanding contributions to American literature of the last fifty years.

Sleepless nights

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by HARDWICK, ELIZABETH. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by HARDWICK, ELIZABETH