Review by Choice Review
Women's contributions are often overshadowed by those of their spouses. Hardwick (1916--2007) suffered that fate when she was married to poet Robert Lowell (1917--77). Historian and biographer Cathy Curtis (author of A Generous Vision: The Creative Life of Elaine de Kooning, CH, Apr'18, 55-2733) mentions the difficulty of separating the two because their lives were intertwined. A native of Kentucky, Hardwick moved to New York in the 1930s and launched her career publishing in journals, including the Partisan Review. Her writings were eclectic, ranging from recollections of life in the South to literary references to Kafka. Offering caustic reviews, she became friends with such notables as T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Mary McCarthy, and historian A. M. Schlesinger Jr. She met Lowell at a writers' conference, married him in 1949, and subsequently became aware of his bipolarity and womanizing. They moved often, but both continued to write. Hardwick founded, with others, The New York Review of Books (1963), and she published an autobiographical novel, Sleepless Nights, in 1979. Hardwick and Lowell were divorced in 1972, but Hardwick remained an active writer until her death. The Hardwick-Lowell correspondence is published in The Dolphin Letters, 1970--1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle, ed. by Saskia Hamilton (2019). Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. --Paul D. Travis, Texas Woman's University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Curtis specializes in the lives of exceptionally creative, not well-enough-known women, venturing here into the literary realm with the first biography of Elizabeth Hardwick, a critic, essayist, and fiction writer cherished by kindred spirits and deserving a wider world of readers. Raised in Kentucky in a large family of small means and high expectations, Hardwick was an aspiring academic until writing claimed her wholly. Curtis skillfully tracks how the Southerner became a consummate New Yorker, struggling through tough times to emerge as a virtuoso stylist with uncompromising "critical acuity" rooted in her "powers of empathy and close-grained analysis." A penetrating thinker, Hardwick held books and theater to the highest standards, incensing some and thrilling others with her coruscating reviews. She also wrote incandescent social justice essays. A regular in the Partisan Review, a founding board member for the New York Review of Books, and published often in the New Yorker, Harper's, and Vogue, Hardwick also wrote seminal books, lectured, taught, and raised her daughter on her own as her marriage to poet Robert Lowell collapsed rather scandalously under the pressure of his bipolar disorder. Curtis recounts in resonant detail Hardwick's demanding life in New York, Europe, and Maine, charting each phase in her passionately intellectual and artistic life, and adeptly lacing her involving and invaluable chronicle with exquisite passages from her subject's letters and published works, ensuring that Hardwick's etched crystal voice radiates in all its resplendent beauty, valor, and knowingness.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this entertaining biography, Curtis (Alive Still: Nell Blaine, American Painter) charts how writer and critic Elizabeth Hardwick (1916--2007) became a prominent figure among the New York literati. Hardwick, a Kentuckian who grew up in a financially strapped family, graduated from college in the late 1930s, headed to Columbia to pursue a PhD in literature, then abandoned that pursuit to become a writer and "became a fixture of the literary scene." Curtis covers Hardwick's marriage to Robert Lowell, which was strained by his recurrent bouts of mania. After their divorce and his explosive publication of The Dolphin, a book of poems about their breakup, which both Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Bishop called "cruel," Hardwick came into her own with the publication of her "brilliant novel" Sleepless Nights. Curtis does an admirable job of weaving together her sources, but Hardwick herself can get lost amid the many famous figures she rubbed shoulders with (and who feature prominently here). Still, fans of Hardwick will find this a good place to start, and it doubles as a satisfying look at the writer's milieu. (Nov.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Past president of the Biographers International Organization, Curtis frequently writes about painters (e.g., A Generous Vision: The Creative Life of Elaine de Kooning). But here she turns her attention to star-of-the-literati Elizabeth Hardwick, cofounder of the New York Review of Books. An intimate work-and-life look.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A respectfully measured biography of the famed literary critic and fiction writer. Many readers may wonder why Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007) isn't as recognized or widely read today as some of her equally formidable contemporaries--e.g., Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, and Joan Didion. Though Curtis never fully answers that quandary, treading carefully around some of the messier bits, she offers a sturdy biographical account that relates the key milestones of Hardwick's personal and professional lives. Through sheer determination and intelligence, Kentucky-born Hardwick swiftly emerged as a highly influential voice in the postwar New York literary scene. She published two early novels, and her short fiction, essays, and reviews appeared in several notable publications. In 1962, she co-founded the New York Review of Books with her husband, poet Robert Lowell, and others. In 1979, she received attention for Sleepless Nights, an experimental and quasi-autobiographical novel, though she is best remembered for her criticism and essays. At the center of her life and this narrative was her turbulent 20-year marriage to Lowell. Throughout his frequent bipolar episodes and extramarital affairs, she remained tirelessly devoted to their marriage, until their final rift began when he included excerpts of Hardwick's private letters within the sonnets in his 1973 collection The Dolphin. With many of Hardwick's contemporaries no longer living, Curtis relies heavily on her subject's published writing and correspondences. It's not until later chapters, when Hardwick is teaching at Barnard, that we get some firsthand reflections. Prominent writers, including Ann Beattie, Mary Gordon, Susan Minot, and Elizabeth Benedict, recall Hardwick's sharp intelligence and charismatic style yet also convey her tendency for being cruel and malicious. Indeed, Hardwick had a reputation for being unsparing in her literary criticism. Readers may wish for a less constrained exploration of this complex individual, but Curtis brings to light a cultural fixture deserving of more attention. An engaging and well-documented yet somewhat anemic portrait of a brilliant and deeply opinionated writer. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
