Financially, Hazzard grew up in moderate comfort. The deprivations of her early years were emotional and cultural. Her parents were unhappy together, and their mutual destructiveness had its inevitable effect on their two daughters. Hazzard met no one to whom the visual arts were important, and, apart from her teachers, she knew only two adults ‘who spoke without embarrassment of poetry and literature’. She read early and widely, especially in poetry. Culture, for many Australians, she said, was ‘an insincerity, an affectation that could readily be exposed’. The national pastime of ‘cutting someone down to size’ meant to one’s own size.

Shirley Hazzard at the Pantheon in Rome in November 2004 (Kathy Dewitt/Alamy)

Reading the Boyer Lectures, it’s easy to see why Hazzard has held an ambivalent place in the land of her birth. She didn’t flatter, and she didn’t come home. Her father served in government appointments in Hong Kong, New Zealand, and New York. When her parents divorced, she and her chronically depressed mother lived unhappily together on small means in New York. Hazzard found a series of clerical jobs, dull in themselves but rewarding material for an observant young writer with a gift for social satire.

Hazzard’s memories of her Australian childhood appear briefly in her novels The Transit of Venus (1980) and The Great Fire (2003). When she won the Miles Franklin Award for The Great Fire in 2004, it was a welcome sign of increasing flexibility on the judges’ part. Miles Franklin’s wish that the award should go to novels that reflect Australian life ‘in any of its phases’ is barely fulfilled within the international settings and concerns of Hazzard’s fiction.

The Collected Stories of Shirley Hazzard, edited by Sydney scholar Brigitta Olubas, gives readers a chance to see how Hazzard’s career developed. Best known for her two brilliant novels, Hazzard sharpened her prose as a New Yorker writer of short fiction. When, as a young and under-confident writer, she first met New Yorker editor William Maxwell, she thought: ‘Now, everything will be all right’. Later, her happy marriage to Francis Steegmuller, a distinguished scholar with private means, gave her the freedom to write full time.

The New Yorker published Hazzard’s stories of failed or misplaced love. These encounters between innocent young women and evasive men have earned her some unwelcome comparisons with Henry James. ‘I am funnier than James,’ she protested. There are resemblances, at least between some Hazzard stories and the sharp comedy of James’s Washington Square or The Europeans. Both use Italy as a testing ground. And, like James, Hazzard is a ‘historian of fine consciences’.

Yet there is an important difference, which is only partly a matter of period. Hazzard’s work has a strong political here-and-now quality that would be quite alien to James. He didn’t know the world of wage-earning women as Hazzard did. Without consultation, they are sent from post to post, ‘given a typewriter and told to shut up’, as Hazzard put it. We see them at work in organisations that draw the author’s mockery as well as her disillusionment at the chasm that opens up between idealism and reality. The United Nations, where she worked for several years, earns her sharpest satirical barbs.

The stories in the new collection follow the trajectory of Hazzard’s own life. First in the group of unpublished or uncollected work is ‘Woollahra Road’, the only one to use the Sydney setting and the Depression period from a child’s viewpoint. One day in 1935, in stifling heat, a shabbily dressed woman comes, in obvious need, to a well-to-do Woollahra house. She is given a meal and some food to take away, but no work. After the intruder departs, trudging heavily in worn-out shoes, the child, Ida, misses her china doll that, with a pair of her father’s newly polished shoes, has been taken. Ida expects her mother to be angry, as she often is, but the episode closes in an uncomfortable silence.

Most of the stories in this new collection were originally published in The New Yorker and later brought together in Cliffs of Fall (1963) and People in Glass Houses (1967). Except for ‘Woollahra Road’, the stories are set in Italy or in commuting country close to New York. The Italian landscape, brilliantly evoked, is the scene of failed love, misunderstandings, and betrayals. A cool and witty narrative voice allows for compassionate understanding of the pain suffered by the thoughtless, naïve young women and the sensible wives whose suffering is no less acute for being restrained. Pompous men are ready targets, as they are in the novels. They are self-regarding, while the women, on the whole, are self-aware.

Like Ivy Compton-Burnett, Hazzard constructs dialogue that often seems outside the range of the speakers. The clarity of thought that appears in reverie may seem unlikely, as it is in ‘A Place in the Country’, but it also seems true to the situation of the young woman whose consciousness we enter as she is gently and inexorably discarded by her married lover.

The eight stories that make up People in Glass Houses are based on Hazzard’s time working for the United Nations in New York. Compared with the annals of love and grief in Italy, these are broadly comic. Hazzard saw bureaucracy up close, and her judgement was stern as well as amused. She saw good intentions collapse under the weight of self-interest and stupidity. There are no heroes in The Organization (Hazzard’s name for the United Nations) and those whose pretensions she demolishes most vigorously are those who misuse the language. When meaning is lost in ‘weasel words’ (to borrow Don Watson’s phrase), humanity is buried.

Hazzard gives a lethal account of Organization meetings. Her hit list of abominations of language includes ‘locating’, ‘utilising’, and ‘indicating’. She would ban ‘hopefully’ in the wrong sense, and remove ‘basically’ from any sentence. Remove ‘dynamic growth situation’ and ‘felt needs’ from a policy speech, and what is left?

Hazzard’s passion for words is inseparable from her passion for truth. The satirical edge of People in Glass Houses is as sharp today as it was in the 1950s when the young Shirley Hazzard first met Organization Man.