HARDWICK, ELIZABETH

born July 27, 1916, Lexington, Ky., U.S. American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist best known for her eloquent literary and social criticism. Hardwick attended the University of Kentucky (B.A., 1938; M.A., 1939) and Columbia University in New York City. Her experience as a young Southern woman in Manhattan provided the backdrop for her somber, introspective first novel, The Ghostly Lover (1945). As a frequent contributor to the Partisan Review and other liberal intellectual journals, she developed the elegant, incisive analytical voice that became her trademark. Her marriage to the poet Robert Lowell lasted from 1949 to 1972, during which period Hardwick wrote her second novel, The Simple Truth (1955); edited The Selected Letters of William James (1961); published an essay collection entitled A View of My Own (1962); and helped to found The New York Review of Books (1963). The latter journal became the principal outlet for her criticism, a second volume of which, Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature, appeared in 1974. She also edited the multivolume Rediscovered Fiction by American Women (1977). The novel Sleepless Nights (1979) is a partly autobiographical work. In 1990 she published History.