Straight out brilliant in terms of both style and content. These essays made me want to return to so many classic works of fiction. The essay on the Brontes is particularly lovely. And what sensitive, empathetic biographical sketches of Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, and Dorothy Wordsworth! I also loved her feminist overview of seduction and rape in European literature across the centuries. And the essays on A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler are absolutely models of close reading and literary criticism and made me eager to give both of these plays another chance. Such an exciting reading experience! Her sometimes subtle sense of irony is gorgeous as well.

As is the case for many a writer, what makes for good writing doesn't make for good human being. Hardwick has the sort of odious confidence whose origins always lie in hierarchical classification of the arbitrary, whether it be sanity, gender dichotomy, or class. Take away all that, and all that'd be left would be various petty, if artfully syntaxed, rantings about peep show suicide, the righteous introvert, the inevitable pathos of rape, and men needing to do what men need to do. The fact that I still find this extraordinarily comfortable to read simply attests to how often I've been trained to associate the various name drops and theories with manna from the heaven, not instinctive preference. I keep my head more often than not these days, so I'll be taking this self-absorbed meditation on the Brontës, Ibsen, Zelda Fitzgerald, Plath, Woolf, and Dorothy Wordsworth as simply that: informative, but solely as a map with myriads of spaces that need be filled with something more humanely filling than "Here there be Monsters."

The book started on decent note and went downhill from there, belying the admittedly well structured quality of prose that maintained itself throughout. While I'll admit to falling more often into the trap of uncritical engagement when it comes to any of the Brontë sisters, Hardwick herself couldn't do much to compromise her still grudgingly admiring picture of the trio other than go poor Branwell every five to ten pages. Oh yes, poor poor white boy, the only one to get a supreme education without dying of tuberculosis cause the school's a cesspit, so so sensitive in the face of being everything his sisters could never have been and still fucking everything up. After that, there was Ibsen (apparently 'women and literature' meant 'literature and women as tangential as possible to actual production of literature of involving actual women), Z. Fitzgerald/Plath/Woolf (reading Hardwick's fetishistic treatment of mental illness is like being forced to watch someone attempt to masturbate with a bookmark), and Wordsworth/Carlyle (sister in one and wife and the other, but you could tell Hardwick was dying to make the incest connection). As such, this book is little more than a wayside on the way to better pastures, as afterwards I'm hellbent on reading Z. Fitzgerald/Plath and studying the others (even Ibsen cause it's not his fault Hardwick's so weird), as well as chasing after Sexton, whose excerpted quote is to die for:

n  Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.n

Closing off, it was also nifty to find out that the Disney version of the Sorcerer's Apprentice has more concrete origins than some artist's brain. I'm also sure that whatever other facts I've picked up (such as de Quincey's surprisingly keen observations of D. Wordsworth) will serve me well in my academic future, as well as the knowledge that Hardwick has outlived her use. While I could probably stick with her fiction, there's no telling if and how often one of her preciously tortured insane archetypes will go wandering through to make a rhetorical point, and I've enough of that in Goodreads' message boards. In any case, this is why I get the majority of my books used at paltry couple of buck prices. These results would've been harder to bear had I actually gone and spent the dough for NYRB's fancy pants edition.

This collection of essays started off brilliantly strong, half of my copy is tracked with highlighter streaks and pencil underlines, but as it continued it lost it charm and started to become a collection of secondhanded miniature biographies.
I can certainly appreciate Hardwick's intellect and points on what writing can be and what raises characters up to living beating people, but when she begins describing and documenting living breathing people she just falls short of the real thing. It also doesn't help that she quotes biographers writing more interesting biographies...

Read a recent article in the New York Review of Books about a soon-to-be-published collection of the author's literary essays. Intrigued, I bought and am reading three of her previous books. She's smart and fascinating.

This collection is like a mini-biography of each female writer, as if there weren't enough material for a whole biography but too much for an essay, and focused in a kind of meandering way through a field of uncomfortable relationships between men and women.

I picked it up to read while on a destination wedding weekend and boy oh boy, was this the wrong book to bring. Here I was thinking all these wonderful thoughts about the future bride and groom, seeing hope personified, feeling the love between such a perfectly matched couple, and to sit down to some reading time to the obstacles women writers in our history have had to overcome, and how they mostly didn't, was a chasm too wide to cross. Instead, I just skimmed over it and tried to feel the accomplishment of the writers themselves. If these writers weren't so brilliant and so talented, they certainly wouldn't have been worth writing about here, and this writer is worth reading almost always.

Just not while at a destination wedding.

"At the time Seduction and Betrayal was first published, a reviewer in the New York Times complained that if the book had a fault, it was that its author failed to 'make sufficient distinctions between the real and the literary.' That there are no such distinctions to be made, that the women we invent have changed the course of our lives as surely as the women we are, is in many ways the point of this passionate book." --Joan Didion

Elizabeth Hardwick’s essays are filled with quiet insights, so quiet that I found I had to read them in the mornings, when my mind was fresh enough to pay attention. She sifts plot and character to reveal universal nuggets of truth, such as, “the unspoken contract of a wife and her works. In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin—consideration for their feelings.”

As she explores numerous works of great writers, Hardwick is always sensitive to the challenges women have faced, but she resists blaming sexism. In the essay on Sylvia Plath, Hardwick writes, “Every artist is either a man or a woman and the struggle is pretty much the same for both. All art that is not communal is, so to speak, made at home… The birth of children opens up the energy for taking care of them and for loving them. The common observation that one must be prepared to put off work for a few years is strongly founded.”

Instead of blaming misogyny if a woman hasn't made good on her talents, Hardwick takes a more interesting approach, identifying the excesses or absences in character that have hindered the writer or artist. Jane Carlyle, for example, composed lively letters that suggest a gift for novel writing, but she “lacks ambition and need—the psychic need for a creation to stand outside herself.”

I don’t agree with Hardwick on every point. I like Leonard Woolf better than she seems to. But her pleasure in deep reading, in careful contemplation of works of literature, is inspiring. As are her occasional admissions of humanness, such as her reaction to Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: “I was immensely moved by this novel when I read it recently and yet I cannot think of anything to say about it except that it is wonderful.” Yet even when she says something lackluster, she inspires me to read more.

"The problem of creating sympathy for the woman whose destiny must run the narrow road..."

Hardwick looks at perspectives and writing by and about women, always looking for how their pathway, both as people and as characters is hemmed and defined by gender. After the Brontës, this is less about how women write about their own experience, than how men write about women and how the women related by birth or marriage to writers suffer from the relationship. I am grateful she does not follow the example of so much analysis of this family by pouring over poor Brandon. It was the sisters who created art and Hardwick dispenses with the male family members without sentimentality.

I read Zelda a year or two after reading The Great Gatsby and never forgave F. Scott. Hardwick works hard to present facts without passing judgement, but it is impossible to miss that she comes down solidly on Zelda's side. The wives of writers often suffer. Women are often closed down and shut up and then blamed for their very existence. I always think of Ray Carver. I think of Wallace Stegner's almost entirely unacknowledged use of the journals of women in his works. (He does not credit anyone in Big Rock Candy Mountain though I recognized much of his plot from the diaries of women in the west, and then the wife is blamed in that novel for the failure of her husband to achieve what he might have without her. No mention of what she might have achieved without him—and of course that might have been little enough considering the opportunities for a woman in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. And then there is The Angle of Repose.)

Even so, Hardwick mostly presents facts without passing judgement. She explains class bias and speaks from within it without condemning the elitism that bends voices to assume privilege and power. There it is and nothing to be done about it a century later.

RIP Elizabeth Hardwick....

Started off great and then slowly lost its charm throughout

" mere instances of man's inevitable practices"
" Hardy sees Tess as a beautiful, warm soul run down by the dogs of fate ... sex and love ... Her acceptance, her endurance of the griefs of experience, are of the heroic kind; she meets suffering without losing her capacity for feeling. She is not surprised by loss and rejection and therefore never degraded by it."
This book has its moments but on the whole not worth the time.

Hopes not met, unbearably outdated glasses to look through at women