Shirley Hazzard (30 January 1931 – 12 December 2016) was an Australian-American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. She was born in Australia and also held U.S. citizenship.[1][2]
Hazzard was born in Sydney, the younger daughter[6] of a Welsh father (Reginald Hazzard) and a Scottish mother (Catherine Stein Hazzard), both of whom immigrated to Australia in the 1920s and who met while they were working for the firm that built the Sydney Harbour Bridge.[2][7] She attended Queenwood School for Girls in Mosman, New South Wales, but left in 1947 when her father became a diplomat and was posted to Hong Kong.[8]
Hazzard's parents had intended for her to study at the university there, but it had been destroyed in the war.[9] Instead, at age 16, she began working for the British Combined Intelligence Services, until she was "brutally removed by destiny"[8] – first to Australia, as her sister was ill, and then to New Zealand, when her father became Australian Trade Commissioner there.[7] She said of her experience of the East that "I began to feel that people could enjoy life, should enjoy life".[8]
At age 20, in 1951, Hazzard and her family moved to New York City and she worked at the United Nations Secretariat as a typist for about 10 years.[2][9] In 1956, she was posted to Naples for a year and began to explore Italy; she visited annually for several years afterward.[9]
Writing
Hazzard wrote her first short story, "Woollahra Road", in 1960 while in Siena, and it was accepted and published by The New Yorker magazine the next year. She resigned from her position at the United Nations and began writing full-time.[9] Her first book, Cliffs of Fall, published in 1963, was a collection of stories that had previously appeared in the magazine.[2] Her first novel, The Evening of the Holiday, was published in 1966. Her second, The Bay of Noon, appeared in 1970, and follows British people in Italy shortly after World War II.[5][10]The Guardian has called The Transit of Venus, Hazzard's third novel, her "breakthrough".[5] It follows a pair of sisters from Australia who are living very different lives in postwar Britain. American academic Michael Gorra writes: "Its social landscape will be familiar to any reader of Lessing or Murdoch or Drabble, and yet it is not an English novel. Hazzard lacks the concern with gentility – for or against – that marks almost all English writers of her generation. She has the keenest of eyes for the nuances of class ... and yet doesn't appear to have anything herself at stake in getting it all down."[10]
Hazzard's final novel, The Great Fire, appeared more than 20 years later.[5] Its protagonist is a British war hero in Asia a few years after the war.[11]
In addition to fiction, Hazzard wrote two nonfiction books critical of the United Nations: Defeat of an Ideal (1973) and Countenance of Truth (1990). Defeat of an Ideal presents evidence of the apparently widespread McCarthyism in the Secretariat from 1951 to 1955.[9]Countenance of Truth alleges that senior international diplomats had been aware of the Nazi past of Kurt Waldheim yet allowed him to rise through the Secretariat ranks to the position of Secretary-General, a claim she first made in a 1980 New Republic article.[2][9] Her collection of short stories, People in Glass Houses, is presented as a satire on "The Organisation", manifestly inspired by the United Nations.[12]
Hazzard wrote Greene on Capri, a memoir of her friendship with her husband Francis Steegmuller, a Flaubert scholar,[13] and his comrade in literature and travel Graham Greene, whom she met in the 1960s and considered an influence.[5][14] Her last work of nonfiction, The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples (2008), is a collection of writings on Naples co-authored by Steegmuller.[15]
Style and themes
Hazzard admired the writing of Henry James and Ivy Compton-Burnett, and critics have noted similarities to their work, particularly in the use of dialogue.[9][5] Critics have also called Hazzard's style "austere" and concise.[9]
Hazzard's characters and plots often mirrored events and people in her own life. According to one commentator, Hazzard's early life "was a carbon copy of Helen Driscoll's" (the heroine of The Great Fire).[7] Helen and her brother, the dying Benedict, are described as "wonderfully well-read, a poetic pair who live in literature", and Hazzard once said that poetry had always been the centre of her life.[8] In addition, Helen Driscoll has to move to New Zealand, as Hazzard did.[2] Similarly, the character of Elizabeth in Hazzard's short story "Sir Cecil's Ride" is young, living in Hong Kong, and working for Combined Services Intelligence.[7]
Christine Kearney wrote in The Canberra Times that Hazzard's "fine and formal prose features high-minded protagonists who prize love, beauty and art, and who are frequently hamstrung by the philistines or the callous in their midst", adding, "while Hazzard has a peerless elegance and effortless control over her material, her occasional haughtiness may seem naive to a contemporary audience."[16]
Richard Eder wrote in The New York Times that Greene on Capri "was a two-decade crossword puzzle that the novelist Shirley Hazzard began that day, presuming out of her habitual restraint and courtesy upon the privilege of the tiny literary freemasonry that still could speak yards of poetry by heart."[13]
In 1963, Hazzard married the writer Francis Steegmuller, and the couple moved to Europe. They initially lived in Paris, with visits to Italy, and in the early 1970s settled in Capri.[9] They also kept an apartment in New York City. Hazzard and Steegmuller went to New York in August, "to write in peace, as no one is there", and then returned to Italy in the fall.[19]
Steegmuller died in 1994.
Hazzard died in New York City on 12 December 2016, aged 85. She was reported to have had dementia.[2]
^ abcdOlubas, Brigitta (2012). Shirley Hazzard: literary expatriate and cosmopolitan humanist. New York City: Cambria Press. p. 30. ISBN978-1-60497-804-9.
