'Hardwick's sentences are burned in my brain.' - Susan SontagSidelined. Betrayed. Killed off. Elizabeth Hardwick considers the history of women and literature. She imagines the lives of the Brontes, Woolf, Eliot and Plath; the fate of literary wives such as Zelda Fitzgerald and Jane Carlyle; and the stories of fictional heroines from Richardson's Clarissa to Ibsen's Nora. With her radiant sympathy and wisdom, Hardwick mines their childhoods, marriages, and personalities to probe the costs of sex, love, and marriage. She asks who is the seducer and who the seduced; who the victim and who the victor. Both timely and timeless, these devastatingly stylish essays are nothing less than a reckoning, dissecting relations between the sexes, women and writing, work and life.

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007) was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and educated at the University of Kentucky and Columbia University. She was one of the great critics and intellectuals of her time. As co-founder of The New York Review of Books, she contributed more than a hundred pieces to the magazine, as well as writing fiction for the Partisan Review and New Yorker. She authored three novels, a biography of Herman Melville, and four collections of essays, and was the recipient of a Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Lifetime Achievement Citation from the National Book Critics Circle. Hardwick was married to the poet Robert Lowell from 1949 to 1972 and their collected correspondence, The Dolphin Letters, will be published in 2019.Deborah Levy is a British playwright, novelist and poet, who has also written for the RSC and the BBC. She is the author of a celebrated story collection, Black Vodka, and six novels including Swimming Home, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012, and Hot Milk, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and Man Booker Prize 2016. She is writing a three-part series of'living autobiographies' which far includes The Cost of Living and Things I Don't Want To Know. Her new novel, The Man Who Saw Everything, will be published in August 2019.