Lowell left her brutally for Lady Caroline Blackwood, who bore him a son but could not stand his descents into mania. The end was appalling for all of them. Fleeing Ireland and Caroline in 1977, Lowell flew to New York desperately seeking Hardwick. He died in a Yellow Cab at her door.

In New York, Elizabeth Hardwick is known as a novelist and short story writer, more admired than read. Over a lifetime – she died in 2007 at the age of ninety-one – she became a formidable critic. Collected Essays brings together, invaluably, her work from Partisan Review days in the 1950s to the birth and flowering of the New York Review of Books, of which she was a founding contributor. (Lowell’s trust fund provided the collateral for NYRB’s start-up loan.) The review essay, which became the hallmark of Robert Silvers’s NYRB, fitted her like a Halston suit. As a critic she always wrote like a novelist, taking pains to expatiate on the character and context of the writer under review. As deftly as Henry James but more forthrightly, she could summon a city or define an event in a paragraph. On Boston’s ‘whimsical stagnation’ in the 1950s, she wrote:

If the old things of Boston are too heavy and plushy, the new either hasn’t been born or is appallingly shabby and poor. As early as Thanksgiving, Christmas decorations unequaled for cheap ugliness go up in the Public Garden and on the Boston Common. Year after year the city fathers bring out crèches and camels and Mother and Child so badly made and of such tasteless colours they verge on blasphemy.

Hardwick was a metropolitan critic, free of academic critical fashions. As she wrote for intensely competitive journals, her criticism had to be readable and rigorous. In this she succeeded as few others have done. Edmund Wilson comes to mind as a model. Her criticism fixes on the persona of the writer and how it focused their work. They are not ploddingly biographical: Hardwick goes for the jugular. She opens her account of Robert Frost’s letters: ‘Simplicity and vanity, independence and jealousy, combined in Robert Frost’s character in such unexpected ways that one despairs of sorting them out.’ But she does. After the success of North of Boston, ‘he was to be the most gregarious of lonely men, the most loquacious of taciturn Vermonters, the most ambitious of honest Yankees’. Although Hardwick says little about the poetry, she exposes the folksy wanderer of hill and wood as an ungenerous misanthrope.

The persistent effort of Hardwick’s criticism is the discrimination of the genuine, the real and the remarkable. In the New York circles in which she moved, the word ‘cant’ was never far from anyone’s lips, and ‘middle-brow’ the dirtiest of words. Hardwick is too good a critic to waste her energies on extended negations, but her Collected Essays does contain a comprehensive put-down of the Oxford don Peter Conrad and his book Imagining America. It begins well enough; ‘Unusual conjectures, connections that move from text to interpretation with the speed and force of a bullet in transit, dazzle … these uncommon gifts in alliance with a nervy vehemence of tone ...’ Such vehemence immunises Conrad from wit. Oscar Wilde observed of Niagara Falls, then as now a honeymooning site: ‘The sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the first if not the keenest disappointments of American married life.’ This draws from Conrad the leaden comment ‘that Wilde’s wit not only subverts morality, but subjugates America by diminishing it’. Conrad’s high falutin’ notion – catch the whiff of cant – of America in the nineteenth century as ‘the vast death-chamber of English individuality’ unable to ‘validate individual existences’. It hardly hardly applies to the period that produced Walden, Moby-Dick, Leaves of Grass, and the emergence of Emily Dickinson, to paraphrase the text.

Hardwick’s exasperation is reserved for Conrad’s treatment of W.H. Auden; ‘galling hysteria’ when the poet’s East Village apartment was described as ‘a cave of defilement … the squalor of the nursery’, and the man ‘pickled and prematurely aged’. Hardwick’s response is wonderfully simple: ‘Auden’s eccentricities were harmless … His mind, his loneliness, his ability to love, his uncompetitive sweetness of character survived his ragged bedroom slippers and egg-spotted tie. And his genius, the high seriousness of his life, survived his death.’

Hardwick’s search for the genuine, the remarkable, took her to surprising places. In 1955 she published an article in PR on ‘The Neglected Novels of Christina Stead’, noting that none of her work was in print. Plus ça change …Of The Man Who Loved Children she remarks, echoing Stead’s own emphatic, repetitive prose, ‘It is all this, all story and character and truth and directness and yet it has been composed in a style of remarkable uniqueness and strength, of truly radical power and authenticity.’

In a collection of absorbing essays, ranging from a sympathetic consideration of William James’s ‘indecisiveness’ as a thinker to a sensitive appraisal of Elizabeth Bishop’s fiction, ‘a curiosity about the curious’ to mounting disdain for Katherine Ann Porter (‘unusually inclined to fabrications about her past’), we come to an essay on Gertrude Stein of sparkling originality. Stein is a particularly tricky case on the phony to genius continuum. Hardwick quotes T.S. Eliot’s excoriation of the work: ‘It is not improving, it is not amusing, it is not interesting, it is not good for one’s mind.’ Stein’s character and career stir Hardwick’s novelist’s imagination: ‘In her life, confidence and its not-too-gradual ascent into egotism combined with a certain laziness and insolence. It was her genius to make the two work together like a machine …’ Hardwick shrewdly observes that Stein’s gift was for comedy. Although Stein was known and despaired of for her prolixity, Hardwick points to her genius for the epigram. Sometimes they have a Dadaist twist: ‘I like a view but I like to sit with my back to it.’ She can also be sharply satirical: ‘Ezra Pound is a village explainer, excellent if you are a village, but if not, not.’

Literary criticism is rarely read for pleasure, but this hefty collection is pure tonic mixed copiously with the dryest gin.