[Seduction & Betrayal: Women & Literature] is so original, so sly and strange, but the pleasure is embedded in the style, in the way [Miss Hardwick] flicks the English language about like a whip. One is reluctant to start taking its epigrammatic charm to pieces and asking dull critical questions about its structure and intention. Yet the issues she raises are both complex and momentous. Her subject is not so much the seduction and betrayal of women portrayed in literature …, as seduction and betrayal itself, in literary contexts; the implicit axiom being that the arrangements made between men and women are never satisfactory….

Miss Hardwick is best on women as characters rather than creators, both fictional characters and actual women whose importance is for what they were and felt rather than what they created—Dorothy Wordsworth, Jane Carlyle. Her critical approach is psychological and moral, not formal…. The literary devices...