At Blue Texan, I found this link to the obituary of Elizabeth Harding, a novelist, essayist, and founding editor (or as Jason Epstein put it, "presiding sensibility") of The New York Review of Books. She was ninety-one.
"Love and alcohol and the clothes on the floor" was how she described her New York life of the late 1930s and early 1940s. She lived with a gay man, she braved the smoke of the jazz clubs, she dropped out of her PhD program (as daring an act as entering it in the first place back in those days). She wrote.
Her marriage to poet Robert Lowell was long and troubled. She must have been humiliated by his act of airing her dirty laundry in his 1973 collection "The Dolphin," but she rose above it by refusing regret. Must have been the steel of that deliberate southern graciousness within her. She was a Kentucky girl.
Thank you, Blue Texan, for letting us know.
