Seduction and Betrayal

Women and Literature

By Elizabeth Hardwick
Introduction by Joan Didion

The novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick is one of contemporary America's most brilliant writers, and Seduction and Betrayal, in which she considers the careers of women writers as well as the larger question of the presence of women in literature, is her most passionate and concentrated work of criticism. A gallery of unforgettable portraits—of Virginia Woolf and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Carlyle—as well as a provocative reading of such works as Wuthering Heights, Hedda Gabler, and the poems of Sylvia Plath, Seduction and Betrayal is a virtuoso performance, a major writer's reckoning with the relations between men and women, women and writing, writing and life.

Read the introduction (PDF)

Reviews

A rich, moving historical pageant. Literature's women— the creators and the created— pass before us on stage sets of art, romance, sex, and death.
— Margo Jefferson, Newsweek

Hardwick is at her best.
— Joan Joffe Hall, The New Republic

Like Beauvior, Hardwick directly addresses herself to female vulnerability, to women's relations to men, to their own work, their options... What makes this book special is the high order of Hardwick's sensibility&38212;essentially literary—and her subtle style. Her superb writing is a rare gift to the reader.... It is the complexity of the literary sensibility that dazzles the reader and makes her book a rare pleasure.
— Barbara Probst Solomon, The New York Times Book Review

Miss Hardwick writes about the potential governess, the wasted middle—class ladies, fenced in with their own thoughts of escape and of risk, who were at once a public for fiction and a source of it, being denied a share in history, unless it were through fortunate marriage or intrigue
— The New York Review of Books

Hardwick herself is, characteristically without ostentation or polemics, a gifted miniaturist biographer.
— Joyce Carol Oates

Also see:

Sleepless Nights By Elizabeth Hardwick Introduction by Geoffrey O'Brien 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.

Unknown Masterpieces Edited by Edwin Frank In this original collection, several of today's finest writers introduce little-known treasures of literature that they count among their favorite books.

Alone! Alone! By Rosemary Dinnage In the course of over thirty years of writing about psychology, child development, biography, and fiction, Rosemary Dinnage has encountered a variety of outstanding women, all of whom, in one way or another, felt powerfully alone.

The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick By Elizabeth Hardwick Introduction by Darryl Pinckney Celebrated stories of living, loving, and surviving in New York's bohemian and literary circles. This collection is the first to gather the short fiction of Elizabeth Hardwick, one of the guiding figures of twentieth-century American letters.

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