Say it’s 1958, you are the wife of a famous poet, and it is your turn to have the Partisan Review gang over for drinks and barbed conversation. Maybe the line from Delmore Schwartz’s poem (“All poets’ wives have rotten lives”) runs through your head as you finish the grunt work of the hostess: emptying ashtrays, dumping half-eaten food into the trash, piling up as many glasses as you can carry to the sink. If you are Elizabeth Hardwick, your husband, Robert Lowell, is most likely passed out drunk or off having an affair-slash-breakdown with another woman. If the situation is the latter, he has renounced you and your daughter, Harriet, for a fascinating creature he suddenly cannot imagine living without, or he’s in an institution of some sort to treat the manic depression that inspires these cyclical acts of renunciation and affirmation. Lowell or no Lowell, there is much to do before you sleep: sweeping the floors, rubbing rings off places where coasters should have been, making a cursory pass over the upholstery, opening the windows to air out the smoke of a hundred pensive and hostile cigarettes. Thus the rhyming line of Schwartz’s poem: “Their husbands look at them like knives.”

Thinking about Hardwick in the domestic context should not detract from her status, as her friend Diane Johnson put it, as “part of the first generation of women intellectuals to make a mark in New York’s literary circle.” The lives of women intellectuals in the 1950s and early 1960s were not so different from those of their bluestocking predecessors in the nineteenth century. These women were expected to hostess and housewife as well as write. In fact, most would have been scandalized at the idea of not doing the former; the latter was, so to speak, gin, or gravy. As David Laskin writes in his account of the Lowell-­Hardwick marriage and other couplings of that era, Parti­sans, for which he interviewed Hard­wick extensively: “Being a wife in that crowd was a fate worse than death.” Laskin notes that most of the women chose to write under their own names rather than their husbands’, like Hardwick, Caroline Tate, and Mary McCarthy  (with Diana, or Mrs. Lionel Trilling, as the ­notable exception). “The main thing for the women in this crowd was that they weren’t wives—except­ at home. Neither McCarthy nor Hardwick felt or admitted to any conflict over this domestic-literary split. If anything, they were proud of managing both so well,” writes Laskin. Yet Hardwick admitted that these gatherings were demeaning for other women. “No one paid attention to the wives at the parties,”...