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Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life
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About This Book
The first biography of Shirley Hazzard, the author of The Transit of Venus and a writer of "shocking wisdom" and "intellectual thrill" ( The New Yorker ). Shirley A Writing Life tells the extraordinary story of a great modern novelist. Brigitta Olubas, Hazzard's authorized biographer, has drawn, with great subtlety and understanding, on her fiction (itself largely based on Hazzard's own experience); on an extensive archive of letters, diaries, and notebooks; and on the memories of surviving friends and colleagues to create this resonant portrait of an exceptional woman. This biography explores the distinctive times of Hazzard's life, from her youth and middle age to her widowhood and years of decline, and traces the complex and intricate processes of self-fashioning that lay beneath Hazzard's formidable, beguiling presence. Olubas shows us the places of Hazzard's life, of which she wrote with characteristic her childhood in Depression-era Sydney; her youth in postwar Hong Kong, New Zealand, and London; her years in New York in the 1950s, working at the United Nations and The New Yorker . Olubas also describes Hazzard's long marriage to the writer Francis Steegmuller and their deep involvement in postwar Naples and Capri. Rare photographs from Hazzard's collection and elsewhere accompany the text. Hazzard was the last of a generation of self-taught writers, devotees of a great literary tradition, and her depth of perception and expressive gifts have earned her iconic status. Brigitta Olubas has brought her brilliantly alive, enhancing and deepening our understanding of the singular woman who created some of the most enduring fiction of the past sixty years. As Dwight Garner wrote in The New York Times , "Hazzard's stories feel timeless because she understands, as she writes in one of 'We are human beings, not rational ones.'" Here, in Shirley Hazzard , is the story of a remarkable human being.
Reviews
"An absorbing, well-crafted profile of a supremely gifted writer."
"[she] dedicates a chapter to the novel, but oddly shares very little about the process of its composition ..."
"Her letters and diaries, and the biography itself, become a long list of writers and artists whom they saw in New York, Paris, London, Rome, Naples or Capri."
"Fans of Hazzard will greatly appreciate this well-researched biography of her life through the places she lived."
"Olubas constructs a fascinating portrait of Hazzard's early life in Australia, and throughout she weaves in astute suggestions of biographical experiences that influenced Hazzard's fiction ..."
"As Olubas shows us repeatedly, sometimes in sections that get a little name-droppy...people easily fell in love with Hazzard ..."
"Absorbing the glamorous details, I felt like the Frenchman who, in a signing queue, told Hazzard delightedly that she looked to him exactly as she should."
"The Hazzard that emerges in Olubas's exhaustive biography is rather like one of Hazzard's characters: brilliant and cosmopolitan; living through historical events but strangely untouched by generational mores; at once supremely composed and eager to demonstrate her worth."
"Hazzard emerges as intelligent, complex, and determined—fans of her work should check out this insightful portrait."
"The person behind the fiction stands revealed as so much smaller than the fiction itself, less interesting, less important, less distinctive."
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