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 pals with her,” Minot said. In a class full of young people in casual attire, her presence was memorable: a chain-smoker with curled hair, wearing eyeliner and bright lipstick. Her skirts were full, her blouses were neatly pressed, and her shoes were low heels or elegant flats. The novelist Mona Simpson thought Elizabeth’s style gave the impression that she was “too busy to care how she looked but just happened to look great.”41 While some students were put off by her Southern-ness and her critical edge, others found her fascinating. Frances Connell fondly recalled the way Elizabeth would gesture “as if there were an imaginary audience over her shoulder.”42 Sigrid Nunez was surely not alone in being curious about “how she lived, what she ate, and what she did when she wasn’t with us.”43 Because of the fracas around The Dolphin, Elizabeth’s private life had become all too public. In Benedict’s view, this “taught us about the messiness of adulthood and the consolations of literature in the midst of it.”44

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 books, and thought about literature “as a philosophical and moral question.” She lacked sympathy with students who “think short stories are written out of sensation and feelings,” which are, she said, among “the most difficult things to make real in literature.”

Elizabeth wrote to Robert Silvers that she was working every day on her novel, making fixes “that gleam out like flares.”97 Revision was what she liked best about writing: “You’re up against your mind, you’re up against your experience, you’re up against the quality of your insights, you’re up against your command of language, up against your knowledge, you’re up against your moral vision.” [...]

“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, local voices mixing with the mysterious cadence of a stranger. Truth should be heightened and falsity adorned, dressed up to look like sociable fact.” She quotes Pasternak: “To live a life is not to cross a field”—life is no easy stroll.131 Memoirs were beset by “troubles large and small,” as a result of writers’ “defamed and libeled” self-portrayal. There was also the problem of a woman’s memoir, “because there isn’t enough sex, not even enough longing for consummation.” (She was apparently referring to potential negative opinions of the book she would write.) “In love,” she wrote, what really matters “is to discover whether we have experienced conquest or surrender—or neither. Courage under ill-treatment is a woman’s theme.” Of course, it is very much her theme.