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The Act of Persuasion | Merve Emre | The New York Review of Books

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It is unfair to begin an essay on Elizabeth Hardwick with an instance of her cruelty; she was one of the fairest literary critics of her time, as well as the most elegant and humane. Yet the faintest hint of certain themes, overheard in a novel or play or the chatter of a cocktail party, could provoke her to astonishing acts of savagery. These themes included academics, politicians, youth cults playing at revolution, biographers, diarists, and, above all, marriage, with its unremitting and awful capacity to turn a woman into a wife. Consider the letter she sent to her friend Mary McCarthy in 1973, describing the husbands and wives at a writers’ residency in Italy: Strangely torpid, aging academics from at home and [the] UK; sly, dead eyes, darting away from an idea; envious sighs, and as much intellectual vivacity as a woodchuck. And the wives, of all sizes, yet somehow one size in their heads! They mutter about typing His manuscripts, and they have not made one single demand upon them

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