Hazzard was born into a well-off Sydney family in 1931. Her family may have been materially comfortable, but it was tense with petty divisions and parental discord, and Hazzard drew on this in her fiction. Domestic pettiness is a consistent and often ironically amusing target in her work, and marital stability is sometimes the result of cynical compromises. Children navigate their way around adults, when they can. Hazzard’s most weighty and serious fictional works – The Transit of Venus (1980) and The Great Fire (2003) – combine this highly tactical view of domestic interaction with the intense residue of actual war: the novels are set in the postwar period, and war defines the significant male characters in many ways. Jan McGuinness, in a biographical essay in this collection, writes that Hazzard remembers the radio announcement of the bombing of Hiroshima. Her family moved to Hong Kong when she was fifteen, and she saw the devastation of Hiroshima during the journey. According to McGuinness, ‘Hazzard now feels that the world will never recover from the Second World War, and the thought of war and the continuing threat of it have defined the lives of her contemporaries throughout a long life.’ This is reflected in Hazzard’s concern about the annihilating possibility of nuclear war and the self-serving inadequacy of the United Nations; and her emphasis on the need for fidelity to personal certainties, in politics and in love. In The Transit of Venus, the hero, Ted Tice, is with the British occupation forces in Japan. He is driven to the ruins of Hiroshima. The ruins are arresting structures shapes eviscerated of faith and thought: ‘A single monument, defabricated girders of an abolished dome, presided like a vacant cranium or a hollowing out of the great globe itself: Saint Peter’s, in some eternal city of nightmare.’ Hiroshima is a skull, a planet, a cathedral with the substance lost. Ted has a sudden moment of insight: ‘the colossal scale of evil could only be matched or countered by some solitary flicker of intense and private humanity.’ The actions of Japanese women might be examples of this: they float snippets of foliage or flowers in the reflectors of shattered searchlights outside their dwellings. Later, Tice remarks to Caro, who will become his lifelong love: ‘A conscious act of independent humanity is what society can least afford. If they once let that in, there’d be no end to it.’ In the face of the wreckage and destruction caused by collective forces, the individual can, and should, act, according to Hazzard, on a privately understood truth. (Robert Dixon questions the implications of this in his essay.) The traditional subjects of the novel: the worth of the individual, the value of passionate love and the choices it might entail, the way that fate imposes unexpected shape on lives already subject to the mighty distortions of politics and war are the subjects of Hazzard’s work.

‘The lack of substantial critical response to her writing is surprising’

The essays in this collection are spacious enough to be genuinely exploratory and many are quite brilliant. The poet Lucy Dougan writes about time, photography, cinema, and poetry in The Bay of Noon (1970). Gail Jones provides a dazzling, darting assemblage of associations in her discussion of lucidity in fiction and in Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus. Robert Dixon reminds us of the specifics of the historical grounding of The Transit of Venus: the distinctive horror of Hiroshima and the threat of nuclear war – and argues convincingly that this novel anticipates the ‘trauma novels’ that came later. Hazzard’s use of literary traditions is noted by many critics: Fiona Morrison, writing about the early novel The Evening of the Holiday (1966), notes the influence of the pastoral elegy. Sharon Ouditt points out that The Bay of Noon is ‘conventional’, a ‘sentimental education, a journey from innocence to experience’. Dixon identifies The Transit of Venus as a ‘proleptic elegy – for the late twentieth century’ and links the old form of poetic elegy with contemporary and chronologically disruptive ways of writing about trauma. Claire Seller reads The Great Fire in conjunction with Edward Said’s On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (2006), pointing out ‘how conventional the romantic storyline of The Great Fire in fact is’, and how the novel’s use of English characters in a broadly sketched Asia may generate unease. However, she places the novel within a distinct group of mid-century literary works that use a ‘powerful trope’ of ‘suspension’ in response to the extremity of wartime events. This may be the ‘anxious afterness’ that Gail Jones mentions in an essay that refers to Hazzard’s ‘vision’, in The Transit of Venus, as ‘Italianate, neo-classical, picturesque’ – adding another dimension to the traditions that inform Hazzard’s work. For Nicholas Birns, Hazzard’s United Nations stories, in her collection People in Glass Houses (1967), are identifiably dystopian and satiric. The contributors to Shirley Hazzard: New Critical Essays locate her writing in the literary past and the historical past – antiquity, World War II, the United Nations – however they extend their readings to the present, in many cases indicating how Hazzard might be read in the light of more recent fiction or literary ideas.

‘The essays in this collection are spacious enough to be genuinely exploratory and many are quite brilliant’

Hazzard’s work is not, as Brigitta Olubas points out in the introduction, closely connected to contemporary literary movements such as ‘mid or late twentieth-century modernism, self-reflexive postmodernism and, most particularly, national literature’. Yet the questions it gives rise to – questions about the interaction between national and personal history, belief and vision – include some of the great anxieties and enigmas of our time. The essays in Shirley Hazzard: New Critical Essays provide a fine discussion of Hazzard’s writing and the literary, historical, and philosophical issues that her writing addresses.