The novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick is one of contemporary America’s most brilliant writers, and  Seduction and Betrayal , in which she considers the careers of women writers as well as the larger question of the presence of women in literature, is her most passionate and concentrated work of criticism. A gallery of unforgettable portraits—of Virginia Woolf and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Carlyle—as well as a provocative reading of such works as  Wuthering Heights, Hedda Gabler , and the poems of Sylvia Plath,  Seduction and Betrayal  is a virtuoso performance, a major writer’s reckoning with the relations between men and women, women and writing, writing and life.