Sleepless Nights reads like a blend of autofiction, memoir and prose poetry

Surprisingly, in appraising Dorothy’s diaries and Jane’s letters as secondary work, Hardwick seems to attribute this to innate limitations in their capability, rather than to the social structure in which they lived. She’s fascinating too on Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of William – she “lived his life to the full”, subsuming her own interests to his – and Jane Carlyle, wife of Thomas. Even on Woolf herself, Hardwick offers faint praise: “There is no novelist whose surfaces are as beautiful as Virginia Woolf’s.” Unlike the Brontës or Plath, the Bloomsburyites had a social leg-up which eased their entry into literary history. Hardwick has less fascination for the Bloomsbury group: “to see the word ‘Ottoline’ on a page gives me a sense of continual defeat”. Plath brought “a sense of combat and brute force new in women writers”. Writing less than a decade after Sylvia Plath’s death, the essay on her life, death and poetry is a highlight of the collection: sympathetic, considered and astringent, it has, like Plath’s poems, an impact on the reader “like a smash of a fist”. Hardwick’s writing seems to draw strength from its subjects. Each needed just what the other lacked.” Zelda survived Scott but died in a fire at the hospital where she spent her last decade. It’s unfortunate that her fame now rests with her marriage to F Scott Fitzgerald, which Hardwick identifies as the root of her loss at life: in the two, “defects were multiplied” and “their compatibility was a disaster. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and through periods of disorientation and depression she fought to be well and to create, writing a novel with a terrible title (Save Me the Waltz) and a play with a great one (Scandalabra). Fitzgerald is presented not as the Branwell Brontë of the jazz age but a tragic figure of thwarted intent. The most mouth-watering section is three essays grouped as Victims and Victors, concerning Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. She is particularly interested in the “brilliant, troubling force” of the much-misunderstood Wuthering Heights, by which even Charlotte was perplexed.Īfter Emily’s death she wrote: “Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is.” If she had lived to see Cliff Richard’s portrayal in his 1996 musical Heathcliff, all doubt might have fled.

Hardwick reminds us that the Brontë sisters wrote not out of romantic high-mindedness but from a “practical, industrious, ambitious cast of mind”. (When Winifred Gérin wrote her biographies, Branwell’s came second, before the greatest geniuses of the family, Emily and Charlotte.) It opens with the Brontës, not just the sisters but Branwell too, that “pestilence” of the family who still draws too much attention. Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature was first published in 1974 and contains essays from the New York Review of Books on female writers and fictional characters.

It is not your trade to make tables.” American novelist, essayist and biographer Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007), in these two long-overdue re-issues, tests the theory. For a writer who works as a critic, the temptation when they dismiss a book is to ask: well, could you do any better? It’s a false syllogism, as Samuel Johnson noted: “You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. Most writers have a dominant mode, the form where their talents fly highest.

Sleepless night book