American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist known for her eloquent literary and social criticism.

Hardwick was one of 11 children. She attended the University of Kentucky (B.A., 1938; M.A., 1939). Finding that Lexington and its environs did not engage her, she left for New York City, where she studied at Columbia University. Her experience as a young Southern woman in Manhattan provided the backdrop for her sombre, introspective first novel, The Ghostly Lover (1945), about a lonely young woman seeking to free herself from the ghosts of her past. Hardwick's marriage to the poet Robert Lowell (Lowell, Robert, Jr.) lasted from 1949 to 1972, during which period she wrote her second novel, The Simple Truth (1955), about a murder trial in a university town. As a novelist she is perhaps best known for Sleepless Nights (1979), a partly autobiographical work about the transitory, poignant nature of human encounters.

As a frequent contributor to the Partisan Review and other liberal intellectual journals, Hardwick developed the elegant, incisive analytical voice that became her trademark as an essayist and critic. She edited The Selected Letters of William James (1961), published the essay collection A View of My Own (1962), and helped to found The New York Review of Books (1963). The latter journal became the principal outlet for her criticism, a second volume of which, Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature, appeared in 1974. She also edited the multivolume Rediscovered Fiction by American Women (1977). In 1998 she published Sight-Readings, a collection of her essays on American writers written between 1982 and 1997, and in 2000 she published a brief biography of Herman Melville.