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Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007) was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and educated at the University of Kentucky and Columbia University. A recipient of a Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is the author of three novels, a biography of Herman Melville, and four collections of essays. She was a co-founder and advisory editor ofThe New York Review of Booksand contributed more than one hundred reviews, articles, reflections, and letters to the magazine. NYRB Classics publishesSleepless Nights, a novel, andSeduction and Betrayal, a study of women in literature. Joan Didion is the author of the novels Run River, Play It as It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer, Democracy, and The Last Thing He Wanted. Her nonfiction includes Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, Salvador, Miami, After Henry, and Political Fictions.
A collection of discrete essays always illuminating and enlarging from the particular to convey something beyond the existence of certain women whether in life or the life they assumed through art. In some cases (Zelda's for instance - this on the inadvertently shifted focus of Mrs. Mil-ford's success) art for art's sake, not as the brothers Goncourt conceived it, becomes a form of tyranny and Zelda's frenetic energies were scattered in a desperate attempt to prove something - her splintered self. Again art may be the by-product of another kind of entrapment - the self-destructive despair of Sylvia Plath for whom suicide was just another form of assertion. Sometimes creativity is only a surrogate alternative - see Miss Hardwick's lovely piece on the Brontes; battered by circumstances those high-minded, serious, wounded, longing women found the outside world was unavailable. Thus in many cases Lionel Trilling's What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have is only too clearly demonstrated. On the other hand, subsiding into domesticity, never free of the daily vexations of the man around the house or the household, we have the Amateurs - Dorothy Wordsworth and put-upon Jane Carlyle, both accessories of greater men. There is a triptych of Ibsen's Women - the sympathetic Nora, the meaner-spirited and more ambiguous Hedda, and Rosmerholm's less familiar Rebecca West. The title piece, which is also the closing one, opposes not only seduction and betrayal, but also lust versus stoicism in the 19th century works of Hawthorne and Dreiser and Tolstoy until we reach modern times: Now the old plot is dead, fallen into obsolescence. You cannot seduce anyone when innocence is not a value. There are gains - there are also losses. . . . One of the cardinal virtues of Miss Hardwick's essays is that she returns us to the intricate, multivalent relationships - always contained within society's arrangements - of people that singularly attract us and they are appraised with a fine intelligence and just sensibility. (Kirkus Reviews)
