#Elizabeth Hardwick

[bookaddict24-7]

"The greatest gift is a passion for reading."

Elizabeth Hardwick

[thequietabsolute]

She was melancholy, headachey, with a slow, disciplined, hard-won, aching genius that bore down upon her with a wondrous and exhausting force, like a great love affair.

— Elizabeth Hardwick on George Eliot

[thevividgreenmoss]

One winter she wore a great lynx coat, and in it she moved, menacing and handsome as a Cossack, pacing about in the trap of her vitality. Quarrelsome dreams sometimes rushed through her speech and accounts of wounds she had inflicted with broken glass. And at the White Rose Bar, a thousand cigarettes punctuated her appearances, which, not only in their brilliance but in the fact of their taking place at all, had about them the aspect of magic. Waiting and waiting: that was what the pursuit of her was. One felt like an old carriage horse standing at the entrance, ready for the cold midnight race through the park. She was always behind a closed door—the fate of those addicted to whatever. And then at last she must come forward, emerge in powders and Vaseline, hair twisted with a curling iron, gloves of satin or silk jersey, flowers—the expensive martyrdom of the “entertainer.”

At that time not many of her records were in print, and she was seldom heard on the radio because her voice did not accord with popular taste then. The appearances in nightclubs were a necessity. It was a burden to be there night after night, although not a burden to sing, once she started, in her own way. She knew she could do it, that she had mastered it all, but why not ask the question: Is this all there is? Her work took on, gradually, a destructive cast, as it so often does with the greatly gifted who are doomed to repeat endlessly their own heights of inspiration.

...Her whole life had taken place in the dark. The spotlight shone down on the black, hushed circle in a café; the moon slowly slid through the clouds. Night—working, smiling, in makeup, in long, silky dresses, singing over and over, again and again. The aim of it all is just to be drifting off to sleep when the first rays of the sun’s brightness begin to threaten the theatrical eyelids.

Elizabeth Hardwick on Billie Holliday (from Sleepless Nights)

[viecome]

Crítica de 'Seducción y traición', de Elizabeth Hardwick: la apabullante brillantez de una escritora única

La escritora Elizabeth Hardwick. / La Opinión La editorial Navona salda una deuda con una de las mentes más destacadas del siglo XX en EEUU con la publicación del libro de ensayos ‘Seducción y traición’ y de su magistral novela ‘Noches insomnes’ Origen: LIBROS | Crítica de ‘Seducción y traición’, de Elizabeth Hardwick: la apabullante brillantez de una escritora única

[biblioklept]

Mass-market Monday | Herman Melville's Redburn

Redburn, Herman Melville. Doubleday Anchor Books (1957). Cover art by Edward Gorey. 301 pages. Redburn is as good a place as any to start with Melville, I suppose. From Elizabeth Hardwick’s essay “Melville in Love,” which prompted me to finally read Redburn: Melville’s state of mind is revealed…with a purity of expressiveness in the novel Redburn, one of his most appealing and certainly the most…

[dk-thrive]

Sterile, ostentatious and essentially plotless, “Parade” is an antinovel, a little black box of a book. It fails the Hardwick Test. The sole burden of an antinovel, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick wrote, is that it must be consistently (“each page, each paragraph”) interesting.

— Dwight Garner, from "The Artist is Present (and Pretentious) in Rachel Cusk's Latest (new novel "Parade") (NY Times, June 10, 2024)

[davidhudson]

Elizabeth Hardwick, July 27, 1916 – December 2, 2007.

With Darryl Pinckney.

[kilterstreet]

I am looking out on a snowstorm. It fell like a great armistice, bringing all simple struggles to an end.

from Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick

[lemmata]

Very hard to put the vulgar and common sufferings on paper. I use “vulgar and common” in the sense of belonging to many, frequently, everlastingly occurring. The misery of personal relations. Nothing new there except in the telling, in the escape on the wings of adjectives. Pleasant to be pierced by the daggers at the end of paragraphs.

Elizabeth Hardwick

[bookjotter6865]

Winding Up the Week #386

An end of week recap “The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.” – Elizabeth Hardwick (born 27th July 1916) This is a post in which I summarise books read, reviewed and currently on my TBR shelf. In addition to a variety of literary titbits, I look…

[thatwritererinoriordan]

It is literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick's birthday. The photo is accurately captioned as a photo of Elizabeth Hardwick's husband, Robert Lowell, with his fellow poet Elizabeth Bishop. Bishop and Lowell enjoyed a 30-year friendship. To be clear, Bishop is an entirely different Elizabeth (and a lesbian) than Lowell's wife Hardwick (not a lesbian).

Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil

[thequietabsolute]

… she had the devotion of a man whose love had in it that element of adoration and self-suppression which is dearest of all to a woman like George Eliot, at once jealous and dependent, demanding exclusive devotion and needing incessant care — but ready to give all she had in return.

— Eliza Linton, regarding George Henry Lewes, George Eliot’s husband.

[favorite-characters]

𝕋𝕨𝕚𝕝𝕚𝕘𝕙𝕥

Peter Facinelli as ᴄᴀʀʟɪꜱʟᴇ ᴄᴜʟʟᴇɴ × Elizabeth Reaser as ᴇꜱᴍᴇ ᴄᴜʟʟᴇɴ × Nikki Reed as ʀᴏꜱᴀʟɪᴇ ʜᴀʟᴇ × Kellan Lutz as ᴇᴍᴍᴇᴛᴛ ᴄᴜʟʟᴇɴ × Ashley Greene as ᴀʟɪᴄᴇ ᴄᴜʟʟᴇɴ × Jackson Rathbone as ᴊᴀꜱᴘᴇʀ ʜᴀʟᴇ × Kristen Stewart as ʙᴇʟʟᴀ ꜱᴡᴀɴ × Robert Pattinson as ᴇᴅᴡᴀʀᴅ ᴄᴜʟʟᴇɴ (dir. Catherine Hardwicke • 2008)

[thena0315]

SVU's Prosecutors from the Last 25 Years

[lemmata]

Elizabeth Hardwick, on Billie Holiday's funeral

[247reader]

Day 21: Bess of Hardwick!

Elizabeth Cavendish was born into the sixteenth century English gentry. Her father died when she was still quite young, leaving as her as one of a bevy of children, almost all daughters. Her fist marriage, made as a preteen to an equally-young neighbor, lasted barely a year, but it left Bess with a claim on, and eventually possession of, her dead husband’s estate. Her second marriage, to a courtier, gave her a social leg up and resulted in six surviving children, but her second widowing meant absorbing this husband’s debts. Clearly, she would need to make her next marriage strategically.

And Bess knew how to marry strategically. She caught the eye of another courtier, one who had Queen Elizabeth’s ear. Bess was soon debt-free, but then left a widow again when this husband died - likely poisoned by a greedy younger brother who didn’t know that the will left everything to Bess. Now one of the richest women in England and a courtier to the Queen, she lacked only a title, and eventually remedied that with a final marriage to George Talbot, the Earl of Shrewsbury; they furthered sealed the alliance by betrothing a number of their children - not uncommon among noble stepsiblings of the era.

But Bess’s marriage was soon strained, not least because her husband was given the job of warder to the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots - who came to live with them and seems to have been a source of a great deal of conflict. Bess and George elected to live apart throughout the 1580s, and Bess focused her energy on constructing manors, including the beautiful Hardwick Hall, and on arranging good marriages for her numerous descendants.

This last got her into her last major bit of trouble, when she arranged the marriage of her daughter to Charles Stuart, a descendant of Henry VII and therefore a potential claimant to the throne. Elizabeth I was none too pleased, but Bess weathered the storm; indeed, she outlived Elizabeth, dying in 1608.