"I have always, all of my life, been looking for help from a man," we are told near the beginning of Elizabeth Hardwick's subtle and beautiful new book ["Sleepless Nights"]. "It has come many times and many more it has not. This began early." What follows eludes immediate summary or categorization. "Sleepless Nights" is a novel, but it is a novel in which the subject is memory and in which the "I" whose memories are in question is ...

Sleepless Nights [is] a very beautiful and concise probe of the past told by a woman called Elizabeth. I have almost nothing negative to say about this book: There are a few dead phrases, i.e., "moral unease hurt" and "I stepped into [the rooms] with the feeling of falling into a well of disgrace." Also, the second half of the book is a small letdown—stories of disappointment, despair, and the bittersweet ironies of aging—by comparison to the first half's ext...

[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 ...

The Simple Truth, Elizabeth Hardwick's second novel, follows the trial of the boy, Rudy Peck, in order to describe and to judge the efforts of those trying to find out what happened that night, and why. The reader receives information as it is given the jury, which represents society. But he also is made privy to the speculations of two individual observers at the trial, a man, Joe Parks, and a woman, Anita Mitchell. The townspeople, who staff the jury, are, says Miss Hardwick, "utterly of thi...

[Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature] is a titillating title, and the contents bear it out—though not as some might think. Miss Hardwick is no hand-wringer. She is a literary surgeon, admirably equipped to expose the nerves. The Brontës are her first patients and she sets to work on them with precision. Diagnoses: 'In the Brontë sisters there is a distinctly high tone and low spirit'. Charlotte 'underneath the correcting surface' is 'deeply ro...