Elizabeth Hardwick, who died Sunday in Manhattan at 91, traveled in 1941 to New York from her native Kentucky to study at Columbia. She stayed on to write novels and essays, then helped build a monument to the city’s intellectual ferment, the New York Review of Books.

“She was the conscience of the New York Review and the paper will not be the same without her,” the Review’s editor, Robert Silvers, said in a statement yesterday.

As a vital member of the post-World War II New York literary scene, she achieved her greatest fame as a literary essayist of wit, breadth, and clarity. In an early essay, “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” in Harper’s Magazine in 1959, she criticized the “sweet, bland commendations that fall everywhere on the scene.” At the New York Review, she did what she could to stanch that flow. Writing as “Xavier Prynne” in an early issue of the journal, she parodied Mary McCarthy’s “The Group” as “The Gang.” Hardwick’s heroine is deflowered on a floral divan: “(Mother would somehow have minded the odious couch more than the ‘event.’)”

But her essays were generally more serious, many of them addressing tortured women of literature such as Sylvia Plath or Charlotte Brontë, inspired on some level, many said, by her tempestuous marriage to the poet Robert Lowell. Productive late into life, she wrote a well-reviewed biography of Herman Melville for the Penguin Lives series (2000). Her essays continued to astonish as well, as in a 1999 review of Andrew Morton’s “Monica’s Story,” which begins, “The shabby history of the United States in the last year can be laid at the door of three unsavory citizens. President Clinton: shallow, reckless, a blushing trimmer; Monica Lewinsky, aggressive, rouge-lipped exhibitionist; Judge Kenneth Starr, pale, obsessive Pharisee.” It continues in a similar register for more than 4,000 delicious words — a plague on both your houses!

Born July 27, 1916, Hardwick grew up in modest circumstances in Lexington, Ky., one of 11 children. Although nominally Protestant, she once told the New York Times that her ambition “was to be a New York Jewish intellectual. I say ‘Jewish’ because of their tradition of rational skepticism.” After earning a master’s degree in English at the University of Kentucky, she began doctoral studies at Columbia in 1941, but dropped out after a couple of years, convinced that the degree would be of little use to a woman seeking a job in male-dominated academe. In later years she would call herself a feminist, though hardly in a dogmatic sense. She began publishing short stories in literary magazines, and in 1945 published her first novel, “The Ghostly Lover.” Diana Trilling, then book reviewer for the Nation, complimented its “imaginative intensity.” Soon after the novel’s publication, Hardwick got a call from Philip Rahv, a founder of the Partisan Review. “Thus was a lowly reviewer born,” she later recounted.

In New York, Hardwick dabbled in bohemian life and ended up marrying Lowell, on the rebound from his recent divorce, in 1949, after they shared a stint at the artists’ colony Yaddo. Their relationship seemed always tempestuous, mainly on account of Lowell’s manic depression and womanizing. They lived in a series of university towns where he held academic appointments in the early 1950s. They later lived in Boston, where Hardwick produced a famous “autopsy” of an essay, “Boston: the Lost Ideal,” as a goodbye letter on the couple’s way back to New York.

Hardwick had already produced her “Decline of Reviewing” essay by the time of the 1962–63 New York newspaper strike. Book reviews, silage to the intellectual herd, were unavailable. Hardwick and Lowell were dining at the Upper West Side apartment of their friends, Jason and Barbara Epstein, when the idea for the New York Review of Books was conceived. The first issue, in February, 1963, was laid out in Hardwick’s apartment. The journal continued with the Epsteins as editors and publishers and Hardwick as “advisory editor,” a title she retained on the masthead until her death.

In addition to her parody of “The Group,” Hardwick contributed to the first issue an essay titled “Grub Street” that began, “Making a living is nothing; the great difficulty is making a point, making a difference — with words.” The New York Review grew steadily, and by 1980 claimed 100,000 subscribers. It continues as a standard of New York’s literary scene, even if Saul Bellow hit somewhere near the mark when he called it the New York Review of “each other’s books.”

The Lowell-Hardwick marriage continued to be tested, and finally in 1972, she filed for divorce. Nevertheless, they remained close and even reunited for a few months before he died, in 1977, of a heart attack in the back of a taxi. Lowell revealed dysfunctional details on their marriage in poetry collections including “The Dolphin” (1972). But Hardwick said she regretted nothing and described him as “the most extraordinary person I have ever known.” They had a daughter, Harriet Winslow Lowell, who survives.

Hardwick published two other novels, “The Simple Truth,” a campus murder mystery told from multiple perspectives, and “Sleepless Nights,” which blended autobiography into a plotless mix that the book’s narrator, Elizabeth, calls a “work of transformed and even distorted memory.” Hardwick’s essays appeared in multiple collections, including “Bartleby in Manhattan” and “Seduction and Betrayal,” a collection of New York Review essays on female literary figures.