A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick [Hardcover]

The first biography of the extraordinary essayist, critic, and short story writer Elizabeth Hardwick, author of the semiautobiographical novel Curtis treats Hardwicks work with respect and admiration... I finished this book with a strong sense of Hardwicks resolve and intelligence. Its refreshing to read a history of Hardwick that lasts more than a few paragraphs and pictures her solo... The years chronicled in Curtiss book are, as they always will be, dominated by Lowell, but documented here is Towards the end, Hardwick observed that Writing is so hard... It's the only time in your life when you have to think. She kept at it, excelled and endured, and this book does that effort justice. As a biographer, Curtis is sober, respectful, diligent... Curtis recounts in resonant detail Hardwicks demanding life in New York, Europe, and Maine, charting each phase in her passionately intellectual and artistic life, and adeptly lacing her involving and invaluable chronicle with exquisite passages from her subjects letters and published works, ensuring that Hardwicks etched crystal voice radiates in all its resplendent beauty, valor, and knowingness. Elizabeth Hardwick was a complex woman who disguised her rapier intelligence and acid wit under a ladylike Southern drawl.?Born in?Lexington, Kentucky, the eighth of eleven children, she somehow developed a bookish, elegant sensibility that would eventually bring her to New York City and into the bright, hot, competitive center of the literary world, where she became a writer of distilled and glistening essays and novels. Cathy Curtis has written a complex, nuanced, and deeply perceptive portrait of a woman who eschewed the de rigueur political positions of feminism that?characterized her time but all the same spoke from a deeply independent-minded vision of womens place in the world.?Too often viewed as an appendage to Lowell and a minor figure on the literary stage, Curtis has given Hardwick the stature, humanity, l“+