YET another illusion has been shattered.

In a new book about the 2008 presidential campaign, “Game Change,” Elizabeth Edwards is portrayed as “an abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending crazywoman,” and nothing like her image as “St. Elizabeth.”

According to the book’s authors, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, well before John Edwards’s affair with the New Age videographer Rielle Hunter, Mrs. Edwards was known to demean her husband (“She called her spouse a ‘hick’ in front of other people and derided his parents as rednecks”) and to bully his staff. “The nearly universal assessment among them,” the authors write of the long-suffering Edwards aides, “was that there was no one on the national stage for whom the disparity between public image and private reality was vaster or more disturbing.”

The revelations are sometimes unsourced and often omniscient. The authors’ suggestions that Mrs. Edwards’s sharp tongue drove her husband out on the road, and in “steering clear of his wife,” he ended up in the arms of Ms. Hunter, have been denounced as sexist and insensitive to Mrs. Edwards’s real suffering.