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Elizabeth Hardwick 1916–, American literary critic, novelist, and short-story writer, b. Lexington, Ky.; grad Univ. of Kentucky (B.A., 1938; M.A., 1939). Early associated with the Partisan Review, she was one of the founders (1962) of the New York Review of Books and has been an editor of and frequent contributor to it as well as to The New Yorker. Insightful, sophisticated, witty, and often acerbic, her essays have been collected in A View of My Own: Essays in Literature and Society (1962); Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature (1974), a brilliant study of female literary characters and of such writers as Virginia Woolf, the BrontEs, and Sylvia Plath; Bartleby in Manhattan and Other Essays (1983); and Sight-Readings: American Fictions (1998), critical portraits of such writers as Margaret Fuller, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and various contemporaries. She has also written a critical biography of Herman Melville (2000) and has edited The Selected Letters of William James (1961) and a work on American women writers (1977). Her three novels, which are at least partially autobiographical, are The Ghostly Lover (1945), The Simple Truth (1955), and the highly acclaimed Sleepless Nights (1979), a book of memories portrayed in evocative vignettes. Hardwick was married (1949–72) to the poet Robert Lowell.
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