Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick – Life, Criticism, and Intellectual Legacy

Explore the life of Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007), one of America’s most incisive critics and essayists. Learn about her novels, her foundational role at The New York Review of Books, her style, famous quotations, and enduring influence.

Introduction

Elizabeth Bruce Hardwick (July 27, 1916 – December 2, 2007) was a major figure in American letters — a critic, essayist, novelist, and cultural interlocutor whose voice was exacting, elegant, and morally engaged. She is remembered not only for her fiction but especially for her literary criticism, her role as a co-founder of The New York Review of Books, and her insistence that criticism itself be a literary art.

Hardwick’s work stands apart because she treated criticism not as a byproduct of publishing but as a disciplined, independent form. Her sentences, judgments, and intellect made her a voice of conscience within the mid-20th century literary world. Her legacy continues to shape how we think about criticism, literature, memory, and cultural responsibility.

Early Life and Family

Elizabeth Hardwick was born in Lexington, Kentucky on July 27, 1916, the eighth of eleven children.

Growing up in a large family of modest means, Hardwick gravitated early toward reading and intellectual life, often feeling that books opened worlds unavailable in her immediate surroundings. Her childhood in Kentucky—amid evangelical tradition, local culture, and a sense of provincial life—would later inform the emotional texture of her writing.

She attended Henry Clay High School in Lexington, and even in junior high she edited her class newspaper, hinting at the literary ambition she would carry forward.

Education and Early Intellectual Formation

Hardwick earned her B.A. in 1938 and M.A. in 1939 at the University of Kentucky. New York City and enrolled in the doctoral program in English literature at Columbia University.

However, by 1941 she withdrew from graduate study, believing that a PhD would not materially help her find secure teaching positions, especially for women at that time.

Already in New York she was drawn into the milieu of magazines, reviews, and the intellectual ferment of midcentury letters, aligning herself with Partisan Review and other journals.

Career and Major Works

Fiction & Narrative Work

Hardwick was not only a critic but also a creative writer. Her novels and short stories often blur the boundary between memory, emotion, and intellectual reflection:

• The Ghostly Lover (1945)
  Her first novel, The Ghostly Lover, wrestles with themes of family, communication, haunting pasts, and internal fractures.

• The Simple Truth (1955)
  Her second novel turns to a murder trial in a university town, probing moral ambiguity, social relations, and hidden motives.

• Sleepless Nights (1979)
  Probably her best-known novel, Sleepless Nights is a fragmentary, impressionistic work that weaves personal memory, city life, encounters, and reflections on permanence and loss.

Later, a posthumous collection of her short fiction was published as The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick (2010).

Essays, Criticism & Cultural Intervention

Hardwick’s enduring reputation rests heavily on her essays and critical writings. She believed that criticism should itself be literary, disciplined, candid, and ethically grounded.

Some of her major critical works include:

• “The Decline of Book Reviewing” (1959)
  This essay, published in Harper’s Magazine, became one of her most discussed interventions. In it, she lambasted prevailing trends in book reviewing, criticizing bland praise, homogeneity of opinion, and the loss of critical edge in American periodicals.

• A View of My Own: Essays in Literature and Society (1962)
  A foundational collection that displays her early critical voice, combining literary judgment, social awareness, and elegant prose.

• Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature (1974)
  In this collection, she focuses especially on women writers and explores themes of autonomy, relational power, and the complexities of female creative lives.

• Bartleby in Manhattan and Other Essays (1983)
  A further collection of essays exploring urban life, literary culture, and philosophical stakes.

• Sight-Readings: American Fictions (1998)
  In her later years, this collection brings together essays on American writers from 1982 to 1997, reflecting her sustained engagement with evolving literature.

• Herman Melville (2000)
  Late in life, Hardwick published a brief but authoritative biography of Herman Melville as part of the Viking Press “Penguin Lives” series.

• The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick (posthumous, 2017)
  This volume gathers her essays across decades, reintroducing her critical corpus to new readers.

Hardwick also edited The Selected Letters of William James in 1961, showcasing her interest in psychological, philosophical, and intellectual figures.

Her criticism often bridged literature and life, refusing false separations between aesthetics and moral stakes. She engaged writers as interlocutors, not objects.

Institutional & Teaching Roles

In 1963, Hardwick became one of the founders (with Robert Lowell, Barbara Epstein, Jason Epstein, and others) of The New York Review of Books, helping to shape it into the central forum of literary and intellectual criticism in America.

Over her career, she contributed numerous reviews, essays, letters, and reflections to the Review.

During the 1970s and into the early 1980s, Hardwick taught creative writing seminars at Barnard College and Columbia University’s School of the Arts (Writing Division).

She received notable honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947. Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Historical & Cultural Context

Hardwick’s life spanned much of the 20th century, including the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the rise of New York as a literary capital, the feminist movement, and the shifting landscapes of American culture and letters. Her writing reflects and responds to many tensions of her era.

• Mid-20th-century intellectual life in New York
  She emerged among the group of thinkers, critics, and writers — including Robert Lowell, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, and others — who made New York the hub of literary life in the postwar decades.

• Gender, voice, autonomy
  As a woman navigating predominantly male intellectual spaces, Hardwick’s writing often addresses the burdens and ambiguities of authorship, autonomy, relational tension, and the politics of visibility. Seduction and Betrayal is one clear locus for her meditation on women and literature.

• Critique of cultural institutions
  Her 1959 essay “The Decline of Book Reviewing” can be read as a critique of how cultural institutions — book reviews, periodicals, publishing — were being homogenized, commodified, and robbed of strong critical stance.

• Personal and public entanglement
  Her long and often fraught marriage to poet Robert Lowell (married 1949, divorced 1972) became both a personal crucible and a public trope. Lowell’s use of her letters in his controversial The Dolphin collection provoked lasting emotional and critical fallout.

• Memory, fragmentation, ambition
  Especially in Sleepless Nights, Hardwick participates in a late-20th-century literary mode that questions chronology, coherence, and interiority — weaving memory, montage, and reflection rather than conventional narrative.

Her intellectual environment was thus one of contest, debate, risk, and experiment — and Hardwick was never a passive participant.

Legacy and Influence

Elizabeth Hardwick’s influence is multi-dimensional:

1. Redefining literary criticism
   She elevated the essay as a serious, stylistic, ambitious genre. She insisted that criticism not be secondary or perfunctory but itself an independent, literary form.

2. A model for later critics and writers
   Her precision, moral seriousness, and willingness to push boundaries have inspired subsequent generations of critics and author-critics (e.g. Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Cynthia Ozick).

3. Cultural memory & feminist interest
   More recent work (e.g., Cathy Curtis’s biography A Splendid Intelligence, 2021) has born renewed attention to Hardwick’s life, especially in terms of women’s creative labor, mental health, and intellectual independence.

4. Literary prestige enduring
   Her essays remain in print and continue to be anthologized. The Collected Essays (2017) have introduced her voice to new readers.

5. A life of constraints and ambition
   Scholars now more deeply examine the tensions in her life: between autonomy and relational ties, between public reputation and private wounds, between literary ideals and personal cost.

Personality, Style, and Talents

Hardwick was known for her exacting intellect, austerity in judgment, emotional reserve, and stylistic control. Her prose is marked by clarity, toughness, incisiveness, and an underlying moral seriousness.

She often moved swiftly in her judgments — generous in insight, but unafraid of critique. She took risks in her tone, refusing to flatten complexity for broad acceptance.

Peers recognized her stylistic brilliance: Susan Sontag commented, “Her sentences are burned in my brain. I think she writes the most beautiful sentences, more beautiful sentences than any living American writer.”

She also had a private side. Her marriage to Lowell, their emotional turbulence, his mental health struggles, and the use of her personal letters by him all created deep personal wounds. She processed much of this tension in her writing, often obliquely, often with restraint.

In interviews, she voiced her belief in reading as a moral illumination. In The Paris Review, she said:

“The greatest gift is the passion for reading … It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.”

That sentiment lies behind much of her work: literature as rescue, as interrogation, as a moral agent.

Famous Quotations

Here are several notable quotes attributed to Elizabeth Hardwick, reflecting her critical acuity, literary vision, and inner voice:

• “The greatest gift is the passion for reading … It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world … a moral illumination.”

• (On criticism) her reputation suggests she believed that strong criticism must engage, not flatter.

• From commentary about her style: “Her essays have plots.” (on the layered movement of her critical prose)

Hardwick was not especially known for quotable aphorisms in the way of popular authors, but her sentences, in context, carry weight and resonance.

Lessons from Elizabeth Hardwick

1. Criticism as creative labor
   Hardwick demonstrates that literary criticism can and should be serious, rigorous, stylistically honed — not a subsidiary task, but a distinct art.

2. Guard your voice
   She refused easy consensus, standing by sharp judgments when necessary, and honored individuality over bland conformity.

3. Integrate life and intellect
   Her work shows how personal experience, memory, emotion, and philosophical seriousness can be woven into critique and fiction without dissolving boundaries.

4. Endure through ambiguity
   Her life was hard, conflicted, and often painful — yet she continued writing, revising, and interrogating. Persistence in uncertain terrain is part of her example.

5. Pay attention to form
   Her prose is carefully constructed; she shows that how you say something can carry almost as much meaning as what you say.

Conclusion

Elizabeth Hardwick remains a singular presence in American letters: a critic whose judgments were precise, whose prose was elegant, whose moral concerns were steady, and whose life embodied the tensions of artistry and autonomy. She helped reshape the practice of criticism, co-founded one of the most influential literary journals of her era, and left a body of work—fiction and essays—that continues to provoke, illuminate, and challenge.