Activity

“Writing a Novel,” the short story Elizabeth published in the New York Review in 1973, opens the same way the novel does: “It is June. This is what I am going to do with my life.” Among the many fascinations of this piece is her notion of “a short-wave autobiography, one that fades in and out, loca…

Turning to the teaching of writing, Elizabeth said that rather than help students revise their work, she preferred “to stimulate a whole questioning of the process, how you go about it, and what’s worth writing, and what’s being written.” She looked for students who read all the time, discussed boo…

Elizabeth “loomed large . . . almost as though she was a character in a novel,” the novelist Anna Quindlen said. “That combination of charm and brilliance, and manners, and steel-trap mind.”40 Students felt there was something formidable about Elizabeth. “You didn’t feel like you were going to be p…

A long article Elizabeth wrote during this fraught period offers a window into her state of mind. In “When to Cast Out, Give Up, Let Go,” she likens the “pinching shoe, the single glove” that women often hang on to despite their uselessness to “the longings, the clingings” of women’s inner lives.11…

The essay Elizabeth published in Vogue in the summer of 1971 was unusually personal. “The Ties Women Cannot Shake and Have,” begins with a confession about her ever-present anxieties and tendency to worry about all sorts of things.20 As a young woman, she wrote, her worries were centered on “disgra…