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.

Elizabeth Hardwick has incredible style: a controlled, anachronistically formal tone, long sweeping sentences, surprising abstract nouns. This style makes these essays intensely gratifying to read even when the content feels thin. This style also sometimes results in sentences that are, to me, willfully silly or just incomprehensible. On the extramarital affairs of the Bloomsbury group: “Want of industry leaves the affairs without perfect clarity in my mind, but the drift of experience is striki...

I thought this was much better than "Imagining Characters." Elizabeth Hardwick explores a number of works and genres including plays, to give a well-rounded review of the ways women have been portrayed in literature, including their own works. She invites readers to really look at characters as well as authors, and we see that what is on the surface doesn't always reflect what the authors actually intended to portray. Many might find this dull, but as I am familiar with all of the works that Har...

I wanted to like this book a lot more, given how much I adore Sleepless Nights. Some parts I did like: (1) the Bloomsbury essay, which trained my eye to be more attuned to the way Woolf's class prejudices manifest in her writing (Hardwick's juxtaposition of Woolf's handling of the Miss Kilman character in Mrs. Dalloway and Forster's handling of Leonard Bast in Howards End makes a convincing argument), and (2) the "Aha!" moment in the title essay where Hardwick analyzes how readers react differen...

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 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 Much of the criticism seemed outdated, at least in terms of its gender politics, but then, it was written in the ’70s, so it’d be sort of surprising if it wasn’t. The other thing I found tricky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,

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.

literary criticism peppered with short, memorably cutting sentences. the first chapter on the bronte sisters is a must-read for anyone who loves any of the bronte sister novels!

I was very disappointed with this book. A previous reviewer quoted the introduction, and I decided to quote her review: " 'In the introduction, Joan Didion says: "Elizabeth Hardwick is the only writer I have ever read whose perception of what it means to be a woman and a writer seems in every way authentic, revelatory, entirely original and yet acutely recognizable.' That's nice."I wasn't sure if this reviewers "That's nice" comment was meant to be factitious or cutting, but I second her comment...

I seldom read essays as fiction is my thing, however, I loved Seduction and Betrayal. This could be due to Hardwick's perspective on the Brontes, Woolf, and Plath, and the new information I picked up on writers I've been studying for years. She also takes a deep dive into the male portrayal of women and how seduction, when one doesn't want to be seduced, has been the ruin or death of many a female protagonist.

One reviewer described Hardwick as a "portraitist in miniature" and this seems very apt. In this collection of critical essays (critical only in the sense that they engage in some close reading of texts; I wouldn't consider them academic), she turns an erudite and gently puzzling tone to the work and life of the Bronte sisters and their characters; Sylvia Plath's incantatory "heroine" status in 20th century poetry; Virginia Woolf & Bloomsbury; the female characters of Ibsen; and the complex crea...

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...

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...

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 mor...

"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 exam...

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.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Hardwick is brilliant and moving in her portraits of the amateurs, Jane Carlyle, Dorothy Wordsworth, Zelda Fitzgerald. Her close reading of the life and works of her subjects and her identification of various echoes in her subject matter make for erudite yet humane essays. She is pretty forthright in her views but doesn't come across as scathing. Definite reread.

"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

there is no one like elizabeth hardwick! obviously. makes the possibility of wanting to watch anyone else read and think about a book feel absurd—she makes the books she writes about feel richer, full of more depth (crazily—i mean i'm revealing myself as a pretty shallow reader by saying this, or a young and inexperienced one). but i still do stand by this thought to some extent, apologetic parentheses aside... my old investment in reception means that i do adhere to some belief that the quality...

I couldn’t get into this which is disappointing as I was really excited when I discovered Elizabeth Hardwick on an episode of the Women’s Prize for Fiction podcast. She sounded right up my street. The essays on Dorothy Wordsworth and the Brontes were my favourites, the rest I found a little too rambling and I couldn’t connect with the Ibsen essays whatsoever, having read precisely zero of his plays. I’m still curious to try another of her books though as she is so well respected.