Seduction and betrayal: women and literature

The novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick is one of contemporary America's most brilliant writers, andSeduction and Betrayal, in which she considers the careers of women writers as well as the larger question of the presence of women in literature, is her most passionate and concentrated work of criticism.

A gallery of unforgettable portraitsof Virginia Woolf and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Carlyleas well as a provocative reading of such works asWuthering Heights, Hedda Gabler, and the poems of Sylvia Plath,Seduction and Betrayalis a virtuoso performance, a major writer's reckoning with the relations between men and women, women and writing, writing and life.