Elizabeth Hardwick was a complex woman who disguised her rapier intelligence and acid wit under a ladylike Southern drawl. Born in Lexington, Kentucky, the eighth of eleven children, she somehow developed a bookish, elegant sensibility that would eventually bring her to New York City and into the bright, hot, competitive center of the literary world, where she became a writer of distilled and glistening essays and novels. Cathy Curtis has written a complex, nuanced, and deeply perceptive portrait of a woman who eschewed the de rigueur political positions of feminism that characterized her time but all the same spoke from a deeply independent-minded vision of women's place in the world. Too often viewed as an appendage to Lowell and a minor figure on the literary stage, Curtis has given Hardwick the stature, humanity, and writerly amplitude she deserves.--Daphne Merkin, author of The Fame Lunches Cathy Curtis's sympathetic yet clear-eyed portrait of Elizabeth Hardwick's brilliant mess of a life is a revelation. A southerner with literary ambitions who transplanted herself to Manhattan, Hardwick married the poet Robert Lowell, whose bipolar disorder led to recurrent institutionalizations that were often precipitated by affairs with other women. Against these odds, Hardwick forged a consequential career as a story writer, novelist, and peerless essayist and critic. A vivid and at times harrowing book, A Splendid Intelligence is, in the end, a triumphant biography.

--William Souder, Los Angeles Times Book Prize-winning author of Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck Cathy Curtis's crisp, illuminating biography of Hardwick reveals her subject as one of a handful of brilliant women who shaped mid-twentieth-century American literature and feminism. The biography's title, A Splendid Intelligence , encapsulates Curtis's view of Hardwick as a writer whose fortitude, bold thinking, and tough lyricism earned her a permanent place in cultural history.--Carol Sklenicka, author of Alice Adams: Portrait of a Writer and Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life.