The novel charts the lives of four central characters: the wealthy, indulged, educated Howard children Russell and Zoe, and their impoverished, orphaned friends Stephen and Anna Quayle. Familiar issues of class privilege, destructive power relationships, and the nexus between desire and mental illness are set among the equally familiar Harrower setting of sandstone houses replete with beautiful gardens and private beaches on Sydney’s north shore.

Unlike Harrower’s earlier novels, In Certain Circles has a tripartite structure that allows for an expanse of time across the lives of the four central characters and of Russell’s wife, Lily, and their twin daughters. At the outset the irrepressible, vibrant, and opinionated Zoe is seventeen. She has learnt not only that she is ‘remarkable’ but that her parents, both academic biologists, are ‘well-known identities’. Unlike Harrower’s earlier adolescent protagonists, Zoe is a girl who has ‘never been baited … never been scorned’. She commands, perhaps, too much of her mother’s attention and concern. And somewhat startlingly for a Harrower novel, Mrs Howard is ‘a useful example of a woman who combined a successful career with a happy home life’. According to Stephen, both Zoe and her mother ‘have a brutal confidence’.

Zoe’s adored elder brother Russell is a little more damaged. As a child, he was the only one of three friends who survived being drowned in a rip. As the novel opens, he has returned from the war and an unnamed prison camp and is preparing to marry Lily, the girl next door. Russell meets the acerbic, ‘weird, irascible’ Stephen Quayle on a train and draws him and his fifteen-year-old sister Anna into the Howard social and familial circles. The Quayles are just one of the many worthy causes to which Russell will devote his life.

Writing of Harrower’s fiction in 1975, D.R. Burns argued that her ‘loathing’ for ‘the well adjusted, the smugly married, the smart and successful, the fashionable’ resulted in their becoming ‘stereotypes’. Whether or not we accept that proposition for her earlier works, it cannot be said of the characterisation in this novel, because those who are married, smart, and successful grow older and become increasingly self-aware.

Elizabeth Harrower (photograph supplied)

Harrower’s mature female protagonists understand their emotions, even if they feel powerless to extricate themselves from the destructive relationships into which those emotions have propelled them. In this novel, however, Zoe takes years to come to know herself and to appreciate how her emotions and illusions, or self-delusions, have shaped and possibly ruined her life. The way in which Harrower uncovers Zoe to herself is masterful.

In Certain Circles may be read as more outward-looking than Harrower’s earlier fiction set in Australia. With the exception of Stephen, the characters traverse the globe following various vocations. Zoe travels to Paris and becomes an internationally renowned photographer, appearing to parachute into war zones (questions of appearance and reality, so central to this narrative, acquire a further layer of complexity through the understated yet powerful ruminations on the art and act of photography). She takes an older, acclaimed film director as her lover and, at a time of her own choosing, she painlessly opts to leave him and marry Stephen Quayle. Zoe seems to be free to script her life.

‘Seems’ is the operative word here. On one level, the ‘certain’ of the title operates in the familiar sense of the phrase: in certain circles, specific mores, concerns, and manners operate. On another level, however, the idea of certainty is radically questioned. One of the great strengths of this novel is that the characters age. Part Three opens with Russell’s twin daughters grown up and off to London on a ballet scholarship. Zoe is forty and has finally come to understand a little about her life and her motivations. She has two movingly intense conversations, first with Russell and later with Stephen. She tells Russell: ‘I’ve just discovered that nothing is what it seems. And there’s no remedy for a discovery like that. Except to digest it …’ His reply – ‘If we always act knowingly’ – resonates long after the covers of this book are closed.

Arguably, Harrower’s first three novels operated as a kind of extended case study in which she developed her characters and her style in preparation for the devastating, brilliant The Watch Tower. Reviewing that book, Michelle de Kretser wrote of ‘the frightened women with suspended lives, the beautiful house converted into a trap, the man and his malice drawing near’. Such a description maps loosely onto Harrower’s first four novels (to a lesser degree in The Long Prospect). Significantly, in this novel there is a marked shift. Each woman is responsible for suspending her own life, but each is eventually propelled forward into a world of productive possibility. Zoe’s and Stephen’s relationship can be read as a far more muted, less destructive version of that constructed between Clem and Christian in The Catherine Wheel (1960). Both Zoe and Clem are slow learners, but where we leave Clem realising how survival might have been possible, here Zoe sees beauty and knows definitively that ‘she could move on’.

Harrower withdrew the manuscript of In Certain Circles from publication because she felt ‘people would be disappointed. Patrick would be disappointed.’ White may very well have been somewhat disappointed. The earlier sections are uneven with perhaps too much dialogue, wedding preparations, and focus on the somewhat vacuous Howard social circle. Later there is an overly contrived, unconvincing plot development involving Anna that, given Harrower’s intelligence and skill, affirms that she was writing under pressure. If readers today are disappointed, it might be because the almost flawless The Watch Tower has for so long stood as the final testament to Harrower’s brilliance. White was renowned for turning on artists that he felt did not fulfil their creative potential. Ironically, one of the recurring themes of In Certain Circles is the need, indeed the moral obligation, for each individual to ‘take initiative for their own life’ and to exercise their intelligence, talents, and the opportunities afforded them, in order to live a fully productive and engaged existence.

In Certain Circles is a fascinating and important addition to Harrower’s oeuvre. Its publication is a cause for much celebration and will hopefully, along with the new availability of Harrower’s earlier novels, act as a further stimulus for a broader and deeper understanding and appreciation of Elizabeth Harrower’s considerable talent. Later this year Text Classics will release The Catherine Wheel. It is time to read and reread this impressive body of work.