quite good! some takes i sort of disagree with (can think of some some pretty obvious points against her claims on the allures of woolfs fiction, and the title essay could probably have been bolstered p significantly by showing examples of how sex and seduction is treated in fiction of her time) but generally pretty great. the crystalline and often broadly moralistic nature of some of her pivotal lines is pretty johnsonian. i’m a fan.

(I haven’t updated my Goodreads consistently which is why I’ve reviewed 3 books in 4 days. That timeline isn’t accurate and I am not a very fast reader)

I… liked this? The chapter about the Brontës was interesting because I knew very little about their family dynamic, and it was quite girlqueen, honestly. However, I wished Hardwick wouldn’t have spent so much time telling us about the promise of Branwell Brontë and his access to actual education from a real school that wasn’t a petri dish producing tuberculosis only for him to never produce anything of note. It’s like okay? I don’t care about him?

The Zelda Fitzgerald and Sylvia Plath chapters were absolute slam-dunks, which isn’t difficult because A. Sylvia Plath is my favorite of all time and B. (especially in Zelda’s case) there was significant betrayal and repression by her doofus and weird husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, that made her chapter BY FAR the most relevant to the point of this entire book. RIP F. Scott Fitzgerald, you would’ve loved Britney Spears’ conservatorship

Tengo que admitir que es una colección de ensayos increíble, pero siento que para poder entender las referencias o reflexiones que hay en ellos hay que tener algún tipo de conocimiento previo sobre las autoras mencionadas, como de su vida o acontecimientos importantes que hayan impactado en su escritura. Me pasó con el de Sylvia Plath, que cómo ya conozco algo sobre su vida, tengo muchísima más cercanía con lo que se está narrando sobre ella. Las reflexiones me hacen muchísimo más sentido y me dejan sin aire, ya que Hardwick ama a Sylvia, y se puede notar, se nota por cómo escribe de ella, que es con una admiración tremenda. Disfrute muchísimo tomarme mi tiempo para leerlo.

Brilliant, beautiful writing. Loved "Zelda" and "The Brontës." Read if you can get your hands on it.

El mejor libro de ensayos literarios que he leído.

Hardwick is a genius literary critic, a keen social observer, a no-bullshit feminist, and a (wonderfully) snarky bitch. I learned a lot about myself and my own experience of womanhood from reading her essays on the Bronte sisters, Dorothy Wordsworth, Jane Carlyle, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Ibsen's female characters.

That said, I find Hardwick's style to be exhausting. Her essays don't seem to follow any natural, logical flow. It's like she goes from discussing the facts of Charlotte Bronte's biography, to Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, to Emily Bronte's love life, to the social status of governesses in the 19th century, and then she's back to talking about Charlotte Bronte, without obvious threads between these topics other than that, yeah, they all kinda exist in the same milieu. But it requires the reader to hold a lot of information in their head at once and—I think because of this—the essays feel both overwritten and incomplete at once.

But I do think Hardwick is a smart cookie and I copied down a ton of her insights. And I'll definitely read her novel Sleepless Nights.

A collection of essays about women in literature, whether they are writing the novels (Plath, Woolf, the Brontes, Zelda Fitzgerald), women characters of male writers (Ibsen's plays), or they were women in the shadow of great writers (Jane Carlyle, Dorothy Wordsworth, also Zelda...). Hardwick is able to capture almost mini-biographies of these people and characters, and their relation to history and men and readers. Whenever I find myself reading classics, I often have a thought in the back of my mind about how women were written in that point in time... and Hardwick wrote these essays in the '70s, and even so much has changed since then. There are moments that I didn't agree with, but perhaps that's because I'm a woman reading this in 2018.

I was most taken by the essays on the Brontes, Zelda Fitzgerald, and surprisingly, the essay on Hedda Gabler. I remember just absolutely loving the play when I read it in college, and dissected it, too. And now I feel like I need to re-read... because it may seem different now.

Will definitely be reading more Hardwick...

¿Pero qué me está contando esta señora?

I took this to Paris, because look at that title, how could I take anything else? Much of the criticism seemed outdated, at least in terms of its gender politics, but then, it was written in the ’70s, so it’d be sort of surprising if it wasn’t. The other thing I found tricky about it is that Hardwick’s particular brand of criticism doesn’t involve a lot of textual reference: she writes about the characterisation of Ibsen’s heroines – the terrifyingly empty and amoral Hedda Gabler, for instance, or the somehow untouchably free Nora in A Doll’s House – while rarely making reference to anything they say. The same is true, to a large extent, of the Bronte sisters, who are the subject of the first essay, and of the women both real and fictional whom she discusses in the title essay (including Anna Karenina and Richardson’s Clarissa). Still worth reading for the declarative power of her sentences, and for the essay on Sylvia Plath alone.

This was a really good collection of essays. Some I enjoyed more than others. I struggled through the Ibsen essays as I’m not familiar with his works, but the Brontes, Zelda, and Woolf were very good. The last chapter, the titular essay, was really interesting too. (So many seduced young women who, of course get pregnant from the seduction.) I’ve struggled reading other Hardwick before, but now I feel like I should give her fiction another chance.

3.5*

Essays about lady writers and ladies who knew writers. I can’t remember a fucking thing about this book, usually not a great sign, but then again I’ve been reading a lot of literary criticism the last few weeks so it might be that they’re running together.