In good fiction, every sentence and detail is necessary. The same is true of these impeccably economical essays, which, collected here with a wise introduction by Pinckney, offer a rich immersion in both her brilliant mind and the minds of so many others ... As these essays demonstrate, criticism should be commensurate with its subject ... This collection is also, then, an education in 20th-century American literature; a book to send a reader to other books ... A mind delighting in itself on the page is not always palatable, but Hardwick, in doing so with such restraint, is irresistible ... Astringent and unsentimental, these essays span over half a century and, as such, constitute a monumental, if unwitting, autobiography. There is indeed a pathos in that. The literature has primacy over the life, yet the truest and most vital life is not in the facts, but the fictions.

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.

As this new anthology of her work demonstrates, she had fresh eyes, quick wits, good feelers and was murderously well-read ... To move one’s way through Hardwick’s essays is to bump into brightness on nearly every page ... This collection is a miscellany, but potent themes emerge. Hardwick took a special interest in the literature of New York City. She was incisive on Wharton and Henry James in New York, and also on the see-saw lives of the novelists and critics of her own generation ... I undervalued her. This book put me straight. Hardwick was a landmark American critic, with a George Orwell-like gift for candor. Like Orwell, her cardinal humors were essentially tolerant. Her dudgeon rose only when something vital was at stake. Her essays have novelistic density; they are a thoroughgoing pleasure.

These [are] marvellous essays – many of them notices of new books, although one would never think of calling them book reviews, so broad in range are they, and so profound in their critical discriminations … This generous collection of her best work, in a satisfyingly weighty and well-designed paperback, is a vindication of what she calls the ‘old-fashioned requirement of a good, clear prose style.’ Hardwick’s writing is clear as clear and more than good: it is sublime.

This wide-ranging anthology, selected by Darryl Pinckney, acquaints a new generation of readers not with the story of Hardwick’s life but with the style and shape of her consciousness — what Wilde called 'the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind' ... Elizabeth Hardwick: the name itself evokes her impressionistic prose, as stately as a royal ship yet as unpredictable as the churning sea ... Arranged chronologically rather than thematically, this collection is admittedly a bit of a grab bag ...this volume offers a welcome counter-model in our age of hot takes and microwaved analyses ...dissenting correctives, dryly mocking the erroneous assumptions of scholars and biographers while delighting in the subversive truths of artists ... Hardwick’s own flamboyant sentences are choreographed to amaze with their kinetic punctuation... By maintaining the novelist’s prerogative for vivid portraiture, Hardwick made criticism sing.

Hardwick’s style is not for everyone. Her wit is subtle, her syntax sinuous, her learning deep, which is no doubt why her work is so seldom taught in the classroom. It is, in the best sense, un-teachable ... In the Collected Essays, one finds a wonderful absence of 'arguments' and a plenitude of splendid sentences, alive to nuance and allergic to jargon. Hardwick has a bit of a reputation as a doyenne of the take-down review, and it’s true that she is very good at disparagement, especially of conventional biographers and biographies. But Hardwick is equally good at formulating praise ... For a Hardwick fanatic such as myself, the absence of so many pieces seems to invite not so much another Collected Essays—one could hardly ask for a better one than Pinckney’s—but an Uncollected Essays, chosen to indicate the full range of Hardwick’s curiosity...But The Collected Essays is in no sense a provisional volume; it’s an assemblage of essentials...In Hardwick’s criticism, we discover nothing of the professor with her ax to grind or the peacock with her feathers to flaunt. We encounter an uncondescending intelligence, a humane sensibility, and a forthright independence of mind for which we, in our scatterbrained era, cannot be grateful enough.

On every page of this book you will be reminded that Elizabeth Hardwick was not simply a great critic but a great writer. This distinction matters. Hardwick’s essays are always sticking their neck out; their aphoristic grace and easy impressionism are a way of speaking to their subjects in their own language, without deafening them with comprehension and analysis ... In sheer size alone, The Collected Essays, which spans six decades and 600 pages, is a testament to the happy union between author and form. Hardwick could quite simply squeeze more into a sentence than most writers could an entire paragraph ... Everything in these essays, be it real or fictional, comes alive to Hardwick’s touch.

Readers will enjoy her tilts at Melville (‘Bartleby in Manhattan’ is one of the century's best literary essays), Edith Wharton, and Philip Roth. Essayists could seek for a lifetime and not find a better model … This is a great night-table book, to read cover to cover or to dip into, to see what Hardwick thought of Frost, Henry James, or Solzhenitsyn, or to follow a mind reaching out to extend its understanding and ours.

Contextualized with an introduction by longtime NYRB contributor and author Darryl Pinckney, who was a creative writing student of Hardwick’s, the essays collected in this volume represent a vital entry point to American literature and culture. An essential compendium of midcentury American intellectual life, one that reaffirms the personal and cultural importance of literature.

This fine, revealing career retrospective showcases the late Hardwick honing her favorite form, the literary review, to razor-sharp precision ... Reading straight through the chronologically ordered collection demonstrates Hardwick’s development as an essayist. The early essays are witty, arch, and detached, attempts by an urban sophisticate at remaining unseduced by cultural trends such as new journalism. As Hardwick matures, her confident declarations begin to ring truer, her impressive grasp of the literary canon seems more thoughtful and less ornamental, and her insights grow in accuracy, humor, and heart. Curiously, while carefully and beautifully crafted, Hardwick’s essays read more like accumulations of beautiful sentences than cohesive wholes, and rarely add up to a lasting impression. Nevertheless, this book contains ample examples of literary criticism that might be imitated or even matched but not surpassed in its style, insight, and genuine love for literature.