Seduction and Betrayal Women and Literature

by Hardwick, Elizabeth; Didion, Joan

• ISBN13: 9780940322783
• ISBN10: 0940322781
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-08-31
• Publisher: NYRB Classics

Summary

The novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick is one of contemporary America's most brilliant writers, andSeduction 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 asWuthering Heights, Hedda Gabler, and the poems of Sylvia Plath,Seduction and Betrayalis a virtuoso performance, a major writer's reckoning with the relations between men and women, women and writing, writing and life.

Author Biography

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and educated at the University of Kentucky and Columbia University. A recipient of a Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is the author of three novels, a biography of Herman Melville, and four collections of essays. She was a co-founder and advisory editor of The New York Review of Books and contributed more than one hundred reviews, articles, reflections, and letters to the magazine. NYRB Classics publishes Sleepless Nights, a novel, and Seduction and Betrayal, a study of women in literature.

Joan Didion is the author of the novels Run River, Play It as It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer, Democracy, and The Last Thing He Wanted. Her nonfiction includes Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, Salvador, Miami, After Henry, and Political Fictions.

Table of Contents

Introduction	xi
THE BRONTES	3	(30)
IBSEN'S WOMEN	33	(52)
A Doll's House	35	(15)
Hedda Gabler	50	(19)
The Rosmersholm Triangle	69	(16)
VICTIMS AND VICTORS	85	(54)
Zelda	87	(16)
Sylvia Plath	103	(21)
Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf	124	(15)
AMATEURS	139	(34)
Dorothy Wordsworth	141	(14)
Jane Carlyle	155	(18)
Seduction and Betrayal	173