HARDWICK, ELIZABETH
'Hardwick's sentences are burned in my brain.' - Susan Sontag
Sidelined. Shortchanged. Killed off. Elizabeth Hardwick considers women in literature.
She imagines the lives of the Brontes, Woolf, Eliot and Plath; the fate of literary wives such as Dorothy Wordsworth, Zelda Fitzgerald and Jane Carlyle; and the stories of fictional heroines from Richardson's Clarissa to Ibsen's Nora. Hardwick mines their childhoods, marriages, and personalities to probe the costs of sex, love, and marriage. She asks who is the seducer and who the seduced; who the victim and who the victor. These magnetic essays are nothing less than a reckoning, dissecting relations between the sexes, women and writing, work and life.
Hardwick's provocative essays were first published in 1974 and won admiration from writers including Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, and Joyce Carol Oates. Both timely and timeless, Seduction and Betrayal is here given new life through Deborah Levy's introduction.
