Hardwick, Elizabeth (1916—)
Hardwick, Elizabeth (1916—)
American novelist and essayist. Born in 1916 in Lexington, Kentucky; graduated from the University of Kentucky, M.A., 1939; married to Robert Lowell (a poet), in 1949 (divorced 1972); children: Harriet.
A professor at the Columbia School of the Arts, Elizabeth Hardwick was also a literary critic for the Partisan Review and, in 1963, cofounder the New York Review of Books. Her novels include The Ghostly Lover (1945), The Simple Truth (1955), and Sleepless Nights (1979). She also wrote A View of My Own: Essays in Literature and Society (1962), Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature (1974), which was nominated for the National Book Award, and Bartleby in Manhattan and Other Essays (1983), and was the editor for 18 volumes of Rediscovered Fiction by American Women (1977). Her recurring theme, writes Joan Didion , is of "the ways in which women compensate for their relative physiological inferiority."