In her criticism Hardwick refutes the notion that women writers have a different lot than men. In her essay on Sylvia Plath Hardwick writes, “Every artist is either a man or a woman and the struggle is pretty much the same for both.” It’s amazing to me. When I think of Jean Stafford rising at dawn to work as a secretary at The Southern Review (Lowell was studying with Robert Penn Warren at Louisiana State), then coming home to prepare the boys lunch, the poets still
