The collected essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

Essays and criticism

Print length: 610 pagesNew York Review Books, 2017

Description

The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick brings together criticism and reportage spanning literature, theater, politics, social conflict, and city life. Hardwick moves between American and European writers, canonical reputations and neglected women, cultural celebrities and people caught in political trials or public crises. Her essays treat style and biography as inseparable from money, gender, ambition, place, and historical circumstance, yet they resist reducing a work or life to a single explanation. Whether examining a novel, a performance, or a damaged public figure, she combines close attention to language with an alertness to self-invention and moral compromise. The collection presents criticism as a form of portraiture shaped by argument, atmosphere, and sharply observed detail.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Atmospheric · Dense · Descriptive · Essayistic

Pace

Measured

Tone

Atmospheric · Cerebral · Reflective

Structure

Anthology

Focus

Argument · Ideas · Voice

Emotional intensity

3 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 4 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 3 / 5

Themes

AmbitionArt and creativityClassGenderIdentityMorality

About Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) was an American literary critic, novelist, and short story writer. Her criticism examined language and literary reputation in relation to biography, gender, money, ambition, and place. In the 1959 essay “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” she sharply criticized the standards of American periodical reviews. Seduction and Betrayal shows her characteristic interest in women’s writing and literary lives, bringing figures such as the Brontë sisters, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath into discussion with women from fiction. Hardwick carried this attention to memory and self-presentation into Sleepless Nights, in which an unnamed woman recalls her life through fragments rather than a continuous narrative. The book’s shifting scenes and portraits place her fiction close to memoir and meditation.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: New York Review Books
Language: English
ISBN: 9781681371542

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