Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature

Novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick is one of contemporary America’s most brilliant writers, and Seduction and Betrayal, in which she considers the careers of women writers as well as the larger question of the representation of women in literature, is her most passionate and concentrated work of criticism. A gallery of unforgettable portraits - of Virginia Woolf and the Brontes, Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Carlyle–as well as a provocative reading of such works as Wuthering Heights, Hedda Gabler, and the poems of Sylvia Plath, Seduction and Betrayal is a a virtuoso critical performance, a major writer’s reckoning with the relations between men and women, women and writing, writing and life.