“Hardwick could do more in six words than any Hemingway type, including Hemingway. Her feats of compression were exactly that, special, not habitual, because she was not really laconic and liked words better than she liked choosing between them … It was because she could traipse and trip up and take a second to recover, then seem only to have feinted and come arcing unusually back, that her performances on the page are so captivating. She wrote more best sentences than can possibly be good for the ego … her writing still elicits the jitter and awe of watching a favorite figure skater take to the ice, too quickly, with a new routine … Forty-one of the fifty-five essays in The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick were written for one of three magazines (the Partisan Review, the New York Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine) and yet, whether they are about hating Boston or trusting in Massachusetts transcendentalists, they are heterodox and differently mannered, with a feeling of occasional verse.”
–Sarah Nicole Prickett, Bookforum, Sep/Oct/Nov Issue, 2017
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