[Seduction & Betrayal: Women & Literature] is so original, so sly and strange, but the pleasure is embedded in the style, in the way [Miss Hardwick] flicks the English language about like a whip. One is reluctant to start taking its epigrammatic charm to pieces and asking dull critical questions about its structure and intention. Yet the issues she raises are both complex and momentous. Her subject is not so much the seduction and betrayal of women portrayed in literature …, as seduction and betrayal itself, in literary contexts; the implicit axiom being that the arrangements made between men and women are never satisfactory….

Miss Hardwick is best on women as characters rather than creators, both fictional characters and actual women whose importance is for what they were and felt rather than what they created—Dorothy Wordsworth, Jane Carlyle. Her critical approach is psychological and moral, not formal…. The literary devices that reproduce intangibilities, the feel of the moment and the structuring of time, are not things which engage her very deeply.

Her real concern is to present her own angry and witty view of the sexes, and for this she has more scope with the fictional beings and the companions of writers than with the great creative women, for these less easily align themselves with the victims. She writes sensibly of the Brontës, slyly of Bloomsbury, and compassionately of Sylvia Plath, but she is less at home with the ferocious victories of Plath, Emily Brontë, and Virginia Woolf than with stoic pathos. She stresses especially the financial helplessness of nineteenth-century woman, and sees the Brontës' greatest heroism as their willingness to turn their introverted talents outward to honest breadwinning account….

Miss Hardwick is excellent on the women she dubs "amateurs", talented beings attached to men who overshadowed them. Towards Zelda Fitzgerald—on the basis of her novel, since Zelda herself is not actually included among the amateurs—she shows compassion and indignation for the way her writings were appropriated and her attempts to work and be independent consistently foiled….

Of her third category, the fictional characters, this cannot be said—they seem fixed and defined by their creators; yet she has given them further authenticity by reinstating the literary portrait in a way that is quite free of its how-many-children-had-Lady-Macbeth associations….

The final chapter on seduction and betrayal is a formidable analysis of the betrayed-woman theme in the novel. Every sentence resonates and surprises, glitters with a stoic contempt, and Miss Hardwick's method of contriving, obliquely, a simultaneous judgment on literature and life fully justifies itself….

Miss Hardwick's book is in a different category from the usual works of feminist victimology, and simple arguments seem crude against its subtlety. One wants, however, at least to try to find one crucial, elusive piece that is missing from her pattern.