The painting evokes not only the destruction of the Palace of Westminster in 1834, but also that of an entire city over a century later. The nuclear attack on Hiroshima – which Hazzard visited in 1947 as a teenager, and to which she often alludes in her fiction – announced, as with a terrible clash of cymbals, the beginning of the postwar world. The social, political, and moral consequences of this ‘great fire’ are the grand canvas on which Hazzard paints, while maintaining an exquisite focus on the everyday life of her characters. The extraordinary quality of Hazzard’s writing is neatly described by her editor, Jonathan Galassi:

What one feels always operating in Shirley’s work is a distillation – of time and history, knowledge and experience – in the service of a vision that is redemptively tragic. Not only is she among the most intelligent of contemporary writers, she is also among the most humane, the most loving towards her characters, and hence, towards us, her readers.

This passage is quoted by Brigitta Olubas in an important new study: Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist. This volume would be significant enough by its very existence: astonishingly, it is the first critical book ever on Hazzard’s writings (a major biography of Hazzard by Jan McGuinness is also in preparation). As the first critical study, it might be expected that Olubas would present a straightforward, chronological explication of the major novels, The Transit of Venus (1980) and The Great Fire, with a nod to the short stories. She has other plans. Olubas writes that she aims to analyse Hazzard’s writings ‘in two distinct but interrelated ways: examining, on the one hand, the moral and political grounding of her work, and on the other, its compelling, utterly original stylistics together with its metaphorical and narrative organisation’. This is a novel and ambitious task, and Olubas carries it off with intelligence and imagination.

J.M.W. Turner, The Burning of the Houses of Parliament (1834)

One easily overlooked period in Hazzard’s life is the ten years or so she spent working at the United Nations in New York. Olubas zeroes in on this time. In 1961, at the age of thirty, she was offered a stipend by the New Yorker on the basis of the first story she submitted, and was able to resign from the UN. Since that time Hazzard has maintained a ferocious and contemptuous public critique of the organisation. In a series of books, articles, and letters, she lashes the UN for its hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy. She played a key role in exposing Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim as a former Nazi who had consistently lied and covered up his past with the connivance of the UN. She lays bare the agreement between the Secretariat and the US government to allow covert FBI vetting of staff. She notes the virtual silence about Vietnam in the 1960s, and the East–West deal at the UN Commission on Human Rights to minimise reports of torture in Pinochet’s Chile in exchange for silence on Soviet dissidents. The titles of some of these pieces say it all: ‘UNhelpful’, ‘The League of Frightened Men: Why the UN is So Useless’, and ‘The Patron Saint of the UN is Pontius Pilate’.

Shirley Hazzard in 2007Olubas notes how one critic found Hazzard’s tone in these writings like that of a disappointed lover, but that no one disputed the facts laid out. Hazzard was profoundly disappointed at the betrayal and corruption of the original aims of the UN, precisely because she cared about them so much. In this she is curiously reminiscent of Frank Moorhouse’s fictional Edith Campbell Berry, so wilfully idealistic about the League of Nations as it crumbles around her. The importance of these writings about the UN, Olubas correctly apprehends, is that they show Hazzard’s conviction of the interrelation between public and private life: that history and civilisation are determined by countless everyday individual acts and choices, and that none of us is exempt, or can escape from this responsibility. Thus, as the tragic beauty of Transit of Venus unfolds, we discover that the entire story has been secretly determined by a private moral decision of Ted Tice shortly before the book begins.

This interplay of public and private worlds is recognised by Olubas as a critical framework in Hazzard’s fiction. Her writings have been misunderstood by some as well-written but conventional romantic fiction: a sort of highbrow Mills & Boon. Olubas thoroughly demolishes such misreading and demonstrates how Hazzard invokes, then upturns and plays with, expectations of fiction about innocent young women abroad in exotic Italy or the mysterious East. When Helen in The Great Fire discovers that the realities of China are very different from her expectations of the Orient, she too is changed, just as the world is changing around her.Geography and history are recognised as fields for personal transformation. In this, Hazzard’s characters are very much creatures of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: travel and communication making them citizens of the world rather than solely of one nation.

Hazzard’s novels are that rare kind to which one returns over and over again, drawn by their textual richness, the sense that there is more to discover each time. As her partner, Francis Steegmuller, enigmatically said of The Transit of Venus, ‘no one should have to read it for the first time’. Olubas explores this allusive and metaphorical complexity in depth, convincingly demonstrating how Milton, Vermeer, Hardy, Conrad, and Grahame Greene are among the many artists and writers to whom Hazzard not simply alludes, but engages within the patterning of the novels. Olubas is generous, too, in quoting from many other critics and drawing them into her discourse.

In Richard Ford’s opinion, ‘If there has to be one best writer working in English today, it’s Shirley Hazzard.’ In her novels – once described as intelligence playing with a knife – she explores how each day we are engaged in making new worlds with our words and actions, yet we cannot know the consequences of what we do. It is only in retrospect that her characters, and the reader, begin to understand: experience filtered by memory and feeling, by loss and enduring love.

This study is not without flaws: sometimes theoretical jargon makes the author’s meaning more opaque rather than clearer. Nevertheless, Brigitta Olubas has written an original and insightful book which does a major service to Australian and English studies, as well as to the writings of Shirley Hazzard.