Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

‘Still all air and nerve’

The joyously quotable Elizabeth Hardwick
by
September 2022, no. 446

The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick edited by Alex Andriesse

New York Review Books, US$18.95 pb, 295 pp

‘Still all air and nerve’

The joyously quotable Elizabeth Hardwick
by
September 2022, no. 446
Elizabeth Hardwick, 1967 (Everett Collection Historical/Alamy)
Elizabeth Hardwick, 1967 (Everett Collection Historical/Alamy)

The American poet Robert Lowell (1917–77), I don’t suppose, intended to eclipse his contemporaries, competitors, rivals, wives, any more than in one of his poems the new esplanade along the Charles River intended to stamp down ‘grass and growth’, as he rather vaguely puts it, with ‘square stone shoes’, but it’s what he did. Now, in the almost half a century since his passing, and the end of ‘the age of Lowell’, as one critic christened it back in the 1960s, his largely unintended oppression has unbent; as in the Grimms fairy tale called ‘The Frog King’, one hears the succession of hoops giving way.

Michael Hofmann reviews 'The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick' edited by Alex Andriesse

The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

edited by Alex Andriesse

New York Review Books, US$18.95 pb, 295 pp

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.