A VIEW OF MY OWN (214 pp.) Elizabeth HardwickFarrar, Straus & Cudahy ($4.50).
Good female prose, if properly clipped of gush, has the kind of alert precision that makes most masculine sentences seem like so much unfinished business. As writers, women are usually mistresses of microcosm: their themes may not be large, but their literary housekeeping is unassailablethe commas properly placed, the exact word found to match an idea or thing. One of the better U.S. dispensers of this feminine mot justice is Elizabeth Hardwick, the wife of Poet Robert Lowell. Judging by...