Elizabeth Hardwick: May She Rest in Peace

Print: "It has been a bad year for grand dames: In August, we lost Grace Paley, and Elizabeth Hardwick died last weekend at the age of 91. Hardwick, in particular, is hard to say good-bye to. She was almost a half-century older than I am, and I never met her, but it would be fair to say I had something like a crush on her. Allow me to take the occasion of her passing to explain why. She was one of the last survivors of a group of extraordinary women, many from the West or the South, who redefined the American essay: Pauline Kael, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, and M.F.K. Fisher, all from California, Mary McCarthy from Seattle. Hardwick was born to a middle-class Presbyterian family in Lexington, Ky.; after college she came to New York to pursue a Ph.D. at Columbia. She wrote a novel, fell in with the Partisan Review crowd, and in 1949 she married the poet Robert Lowell. In the early '60s, she and Lowell, along with Jason and Barbara Epstein, founded the New York Review of Books, and the essays she wrote for that journal, on everything from Robert Frost and Edith Wharton to the Watts riots and Warhol's movies, were as fine a record of sensibility, thought, and composition as that periodical, or any other, ever printed. She once admitted—half-jokingly, but only half—that as a young woman she wanted to be a New York Jewish Intellectual. Two out of three's not bad."