Robert lowell

Monday

John Sturgis

Second-hand books tell the most surprising stories

It’s relatively common, I find, when opening a newly purchased second-hand book for the first time, for something to fall from its pages. Most likely this will be a branded bookmark or printed stocklisting paper from the dealer who sold it. But it’s not unusual to find something more interesting, something belonging to the book’s previous owner. Apparently the singer Nick Cave donated 2,000 books to an Oxfam in Hove this summer, and new owners of his paperbacks discovered old plane tickets and Post-it notes tucked inside. We serial readers of actual physical books are constantly in need of bookmarks and will grab at anything to hand to use as

Thursday

Elaine Showalter

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,