Elizabeth Hardwick – författare

Sally Rooney: 'High intelligence and beauty.'Margo Jefferson: 'Extraordinary'Rediscover a lost American classic in this kaleidoscopic scrapbook of one woman's memories, with a new introduction by Eimear McBride.I am alone here in New York, no longer a we ...First published in 1979, Sleepless Nights is a unique collage of fiction and memoir, letters and essays, portraits and dreams. It is more than the story of a life: it is Elizabeth Hardwick's experience of womanhood in the twentieth century. Escaping her childhood home of Kentucky, the narrator arrives at a bohemian hotel in Manhattan filled with 'drunks, actors, gamblers ... love and alcohol and clothes on the floor.' Here begin the erotic affairs and dinner parties, the abortions and heartbreaks, the friendships and 'people I have buried'. Here are luminous sketches of characters she has met that illuminate the era's racism, sexism, and poverty. Above all, here is prose blurring into poetry, language to lose - and perhaps to find - yourself in.Society tries to write these lives before they are lived. It does not always succeed.

Sally Rooney: 'High intelligence and beauty.'Margo Jefferson: 'Extraordinary'Rediscover a lost American classic in this kaleidoscopic scrapbook of one woman's memories, with a new introduction by Eimear McBride. I am alone here in New York, no longer a we ... First published in 1979, Sleepless Nights is a unique collage of fiction and memoir, letters and essays, portraits and dreams. It is more than the story of a life: it is Elizabeth Hardwick's experience of womanhood in the twentieth century. Escaping her childhood home of Kentucky, the narrator arrives at a bohemian hotel in Manhattan filled with 'drunks, actors, gamblers ... love and alcohol and clothes on the floor.' Here begin the erotic affairs and dinner parties, the abortions and heartbreaks, the friendships and 'people I have buried'. Here are luminous sketches of characters she has met that illuminate the era's racism, sexism, and poverty. Above all, here is prose blurring into poetry, language to lose - and perhaps to find - yourself in.Society tries to write these lives before they are lived. It does not always succeed.

ONE OF THE WHITE REVIEW'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019Elizabeth Hardwick's iconic essay collection Seduction and Betrayal is a radical portrait of women and literature, reissued with a new introduction by Deborah Levy.'Hardwick's sentences are burned in my brain.' - Susan SontagSidelined. Betrayed. Killed off. Elizabeth Hardwick dissects the history of women and literature. In her most virtuoso work of criticism, she explores the lives of the Brontës, Woolf, Eliot and Plath; the fate of literary wives such as Zelda Fitzgerald and Jane Carlyle; and the destinies of fictional heroines from Richardson's Clarissa to Ibsen's Nora. With fierce empathy and biting wit, Hardwick mines their childhoods, families, and personalities to probe the costs of sex, love, and marriage. Shattering the barrier between writing and life, she asks who is the seducer and who the seduced; who the victim and who the victor.First published in 1974, yet both urgently timely and timeless, Seduction and Betrayal explodes the conventions of the essay: and the result is nothing less than a reckoning.

'Hardwick's sentences are burned in my brain.' - Susan SontagSidelined. Betrayed. Killed off. Elizabeth Hardwick considers the history of women and literature. She imagines the lives of the Brontes, Woolf, Eliot and Plath; the fate of literary wives such as Zelda Fitzgerald and Jane Carlyle; and the stories of fictional heroines from Richardson's Clarissa to Ibsen's Nora. With her radiant sympathy and wisdom, Hardwick mines their childhoods, marriages, and personalities to probe the costs of sex, love, and marriage. She asks who is the seducer and who the seduced; who the victim and who the victor. Both timely and timeless, these devastatingly stylish essays are nothing less than a reckoning, dissecting relations between the sexes, women and writing, work and life.

The Dolphin Letters offers an unprecedented portrait of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick during the last seven years of Lowell's life (1970 to 1977), a time of personal crisis and creative innovation for both writers. Centred on the letters they exchanged with each other and with other members of their circle - writers, intellectuals, friends, and publishers, including Elizabeth Bishop, Caroline Blackwood, Mary McCarthy, and Adrienne Rich - the book has the narrative sweep of a novel, telling the story of the dramatic breakup of their twenty-one-year marriage and their extraordinary, but late, reconciliation.Lowell's controversial sonnet-sequence The Dolphin (for which he used Hardwick's letters as a source) and his last book, Day by Day, were written during this period, as were Hardwick's influential books Seduction and Betrayal: Essays on Women in Literature and Sleepless Nights: A Novel. Lowell and Hardwick are acutely intelligent observers of marriages, children, and friends, and of the feelings that their personal crises gave rise to.The Dolphin Letters, masterfully edited by Saskia Hamilton, is a debate about the limits of art - what occasions a work of art, what moral and artistic license artists have to make use of their lives as material, what formal innovations such debates give rise to. The crisis of Lowell's The Dolphin was profoundly affecting to everyone surrounding him, and Bishop's warning to Lowell - 'art just isn't worth that much' - haunts.

In Sleepless Nights a woman looks back on her life—the parade of people, the shifting background of place—and assembles a scrapbook of memories, reflections, portraits, letters, wishes, and dreams. An inspired fusion of fact and invention, this beautifully realized, hard-bitten, lyrical book is not only Elizabeth Hardwick's finest fiction but one of the outstanding contributions to American literature of the last fifty years.

Elizabeth Hardwick was one of America’s great postwar women of letters, celebrated as a novelist and as an essayist. Until now, however, her slim but remarkable achievement as a writer of short stories has remained largely hidden, with her work tucked away in the pages of the periodicals—such as Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books—in which it originally appeared. This first collection of Hardwick’s short fiction reveals her brilliance as a stylist and as an observer of contemporary life. A young woman returns from New York to her childhood Kentucky home and discovers the world of difference within her. A girl’s boyfriend is not quite good enough, his “silvery eyes, light and cool, revealing nothing except pure possibility, like a coin in hand.” A magazine editor’s life falls strangely to pieces after she loses both her husband and her job. Individual lives and the life of New York, the setting or backdrop for most of these stories, are strikingly and memorably depicted in Hardwick’s beautiful and razor-sharp prose.

The first-ever collection of essays from across Elizabeth Hardwick's illustrious writing career, including works not seen in print for decades.A New York Times Notable Book of 2017Elizabeth Hardwick wrote during the golden age of the American literary essay. For Hardwick, the essay was an imaginative endeavor, a serious form, criticism worthy of the literature in question. In the essays collected here she covers civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s, describes places where she lived and locations she visited, and writes about the foundations of American literature—Melville, James, Wharton—and the changes in American fiction, though her reading is wide and international. She contemplates writers’ lives—women writers, rebels, Americans abroad—and the literary afterlife of biographies, letters, and diaries. Selected and with an introduction by Darryl Pinckney, the Collected Essays gathers more than fifty essays for a fifty-year retrospective of Hardwick’s work from 1953 to 2003. “For Hardwick,” writes Pinckney, “the poetry and novels of America hold the nation’s history.” Here is an exhilarating chronicle of that history.

Eine Frau blickt zurück auf ihr Leben - die Menschen, die sie gekannt hat, die Orte, an denen sie gelebt hat. Wir begleiten sie zu Pferderennen nach Kentucky, in die Jazz­clubs von New York, sehen Billie Holiday in Harlem, be­suchen Bostons vornehmstes Viertel, den Beacon Hill, verbringen den Sommer in Maine und den Winter in Manhattan. Auf meisterliche und einzigartige Weise ver­knüpft Elizabeth Hardwick in ihrem bedeutendsten Ro­man Fakten und Fiktionen, Erinnerungen, Reflektionen, Porträts, Briefe, Wünsche, Träume - und lässt in funkeln­den Vignetten Episoden ihres Lebens aufscheinen: ihre Jugend in Lexington, die beglückenden und die schwe­ren Zeiten mit ihrem Mann, dem Dichter Robert Lowell, die gemeinsamen Reisen nach Europa und durch die USA. Mit einigen wenigen Strichen vermag sie lebendige Porträts der Menschen zu zeichnen, die ihren Weg kreuz­ten, sowie den Rassismus, den Sexismus und die Armut dieser Zeit zu beleuchten.Schlaflose Nächte ist eines der außergewöhnlichsten Werke der amerikanischen Literatur der vergangenen Jahrzehnte, ein bewegendes Buch der Erinnerung und zugleich eine ebenso feinfühlige wie literarisch brillante Meditation über das Erinnern selbst - elegant, lakonisch, gewagt und weise.