Me ha parecido una lectura interesante porque hay muchísimas cosas que no conocía.
Creo que leer este libro puede servir como introducción para comprender un poco más a autoras como las hermanas Brontë, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf… pero que no termina de profundizar en ninguna.
He notado que empieza muy arriba con aspectos super interesantes sobre las hermanas Brontë (de mis ensayos favoritos del libro) pero que luego hay otros que veo flojitos.
Los que más he disfrutado a parte del mencionado, han sido el de Zelda Fitzgerald y el de Sylvia Plath. Y sinceramente el de Las mujeres de Ibsen me ha parecido aburrido.
No lo veo un mal libro, y como manera de aprender datos curiosos, lo recomiendo

Such sentences!

Terrific essays on canonical female writers and man-made female characters (title essay traces the subject from Richardson to Hawthorne to Hardy), but even better on the relationship between amateurs (Zelda F., Dorothy Wordsworth, and Jane Carlyle), their famouser male counterparts, and the act of writing.

Most of my favorite books and authors analyzed brilliantly and beautifully. What could be better?

En algunos momentos en sus libros pierdo el hilo porque divaga mucho pero escribe tan bien que da un poco igual.

Hardwick writes with great eloquence and clarity and a feminist spirit. Those essays are nearly faultless and filled with awesome quotables that kept my highlighter engaged.

I wish I'd discovered Hardwick's literary criticism while close-reading Ibsen at uni. I really, really hated Ibsen then. Perhaps with Hardwick's sympathetic analysis at hand I would've had an easier time seeing through my distaste for the standards of the era which he wrote about, and seen his female characters with a bit more compassion.

Also, a reminder: this guy had 18 year old girls throwing themselves at him throughout his writing career:

some of the essays - the ones about Plath, Woolf, Fitzgerald - are eye-opening and magnificent, while others are just somewhere way too far which is a description I am unable to explain further.

Elizabeth Hardwick is a gorgeous essayist, but honestly this whole volume felt kind of pointless. There wasn't much of a coherent thesis about literary ladies, nor were the essays in and of themselves particularly interesting. I've never managed to finish a Bronte book (my problem, not Hardwick's), there's some mildly amusing goss about Virginia Woolf, she rates Sylvia Plath far higher than I think she ought to (maybe the Daddy-I-hate-you shit was revolutionary once?), the analyses of Ibsen characters are fine enough, you get the idea. Towards the end she brings up Zola's Nana, which I feel could have been a great essay, but she leaves it there. Read Sleepless Nights, it's amazing, and many of Hardwick's other essays are too, but this is forgettable.

interesting essays!! i also loved the foreword - four stars.

Seduction and Betrayal" by Elizabeth Hardwick is a collection of essays exploring women's roles in literature and society, from the Bronte sisters to Virginia Woolf. Hardwick's insightful analysis of female writers and characters delves into the complexities of gender roles, relationships, and power dynamics between men and women. Her prose is elegant (although it felt a bit contorted), and her observations are incisive. This is a good read for anyone interested in feminist literary criticism and the impact of female writers throughout history.

Brilliant and arresting writing; every sentence was a wonder. Hardwick is an accomplished prose stylist but she is also wonderfully insightful and clever, always getting at the uncomfortable, staggeringly complex core of an idea.

Loved it. Essays on the Brontes, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Plath were my particular faves.