Formidable woman of letters: the grit and wisdom of Elizabeth Hardwick

In an author’s note at the beginning of her biography of Elizabeth Hardwick, Cathy Curtis warns that she has included ‘only as much information’ about Hardwick’s ‘famous husband, the poet Robert Lowell, as is necessary to tell the story of her life’. Ironically, this caveat highlights Hardwick’s status as another wife of the poet. There’s no question that her tumultuous marriage and singular divorce from Lowell were major events in her literary career, but it’s disappointing that in this very first biography of Hardwick, Curtis offers so little argument for her literary and cultural importance.

Admittedly, that’s no simple task. Although she is highly regarded as a productive literary critic, acerbic essayist and formidable woman of letters, Hardwick never produced a signature great book. She wrote three novels which have won a cult following, especially Sleepless Nights (1979), and 20 short stories, mostly for the New Yorker. But she is generally admired for her non-fiction, especially 168 essays, reviews and op-eds, chiefly for the New York Review of Books, which she co-founded in 1963.

Hardwick’s breadth of literary genres and incisive style gave her writing unusual weight. She believed that ‘essays are aggressive’. No opinion could be meaningful, she argued, unless ‘an assault has taken place, the forced domination of… putting it in your own words’. She was also aggressive in her literary roles. As Joel Connaroe, the president of the Guggen-heim Foundation, said: ‘She sometimes made fellow jurors feel as if they had no literary judgment at all.’

Hardwick seems to have been born tough. Curtis provides a detailed chronological account of her life, based on deep archival research and particularly her unpublished letters. Born in Kentucky in 1916, the eighth of 11 children, she was a gifted student and an omnivorous speed reader, who went to the University of Kentucky intending to be both a professor of English and a novelist.