Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Cosmopolitan, richly intelligent, beautiful, questing - Shirley Hazzard's writing reflects her life. The acclaim it attracts is immeasurable.
Brigitta Olubas tells the story of a girl from the suburbs of Sydney, Australia who fell early under the spell of words and sought out books as her companions. In the process she transformed and indeed created her life. She became a woman of the world who felt injustice keenly and a deep and original thinker, who wrote some of the most beautiful novels - Transit of Venus and The Great Fire among them - and always with an eye to the ways we reveal ourselves to another.
'One of those rare biographies that sends one greedily back to the subject's word, better equipped to appreciate the richness on display'
LUCY SCHOLES, Financial Times
'Strikingly well-placed and well-proportioned... as befits her subject, Olubas comes with a gift for place and psychology'
MICHAEL HOFMANN, Times Literary Supplement
'This new account of Hazzard's life should confirm her as one of the 20th century's greatest novelists'
CHLOE SCHAMA, Vogue
'An impeccably researched and deeply incisive account of Hazzard's life and work, and the intriguing interplay between the two'
LILY KING, New York Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A woman raised in tumult seeks a higher realm in art and literature in this rich biography from Olubas (Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist). Born in Australia in 1931, Hazzard had an "unhappy childhood" and "embarked early on a project of self-cultivation and self-creation through extensive and passionate reading." That culminated, the author writes, in her marriage to the well-heeled Francis Steegmuller, a Flaubert scholar and translator 25 years her senior, as it cemented Hazzard's social position and offered her financial security. Of strong opinions, Hazzard roundly condemned Nixon as "Satanic," while calling Reagan "a new dimension of blatancy in evil." The book's chief charm, however, lies in documenting Hazzard's witnessing the span of the 20th century—as Hazzard herself wrote to a friend, "I saw Hiroshima in ruins, I knew a Hong Kong without skyscrapers... heard Eliot read The Four Quartets... walked about a blitzed but marvellous London." All of this became fodder for Hazzard's well-received stories, essays, and novels. Olubas does a fine job dealing frankly with those who disliked Hazzard's "elitism" as well as those who praised her, with a careful touch for capturing the "implicit misogyny" she was up against. Hazzard emerges as intelligent, complex, and determined—fans of her work should check out this insightful portrait.
