Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Discover the extraordinary life of Shirley Hazzard, the acclaimed author of The Transit of Venus and a writer of "shocking wisdom" and "intellectual thrill" (The New Yorker), in this compelling biography.
Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life tells the remarkable story of a great modern novelist. Brigitta Olubas, Hazzard's authorized biographer, draws on Hazzard's fiction, an extensive archive of letters, diaries, and notebooks, and the memories of surviving friends and colleagues to create a 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, tracing the complex processes of self-fashioning that lay beneath her formidable, beguiling presence. Olubas takes us to the places Hazzard wrote about with characteristic lyricism, accompanied by rare photographs from Hazzard's collection.
As the last of a generation of self-taught writers and devotees of a great literary tradition, Hazzard's depth of perception and expressive gifts have earned her iconic status. Olubas brilliantly brings her to life, deepening our understanding of the singular woman behind some of the most enduring fiction of the past sixty years. In the words of Dwight Garner in The New York Times, "Hazzard's stories feel timeless because she understands, as she writes in one of them: 'We are human beings, not rational ones.'" Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life is the story of a remarkable human being.
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.
