Hazzard, Shirley 1931–

PERSONAL: Born January 30, 1931, in Sydney, Australia; daughter of Reginald (a government official) and Catherine (Stein) Hazzard; married Francis Steegmuller (a novelist and biographer), December 22, 1963 (died, October, 1994). Education: Educated at Queenwood College, Sydney, Australia.

ADDRESSES: Home—200 East 66th St., New York, NY 10021. Agent—McIntosh & Otis, Inc., 475 5th Ave., New York, NY 10017.

CAREER: Writer. Worked for British Intelligence in Hong Kong (now China), 1947–48, and for British High Commissioner's Office, Wellington, New Zealand, 1949–50; United Nations, New York, NY, worked in general service category, Technical Assistance to Underdeveloped Countries, 1952–62, served in Italy, 1957. Boyer lecturer, Australia, 1984, 1988.

MEMBER: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

AWARDS, HONORS: U.S. National Institute of Arts and Letters award in literature, 1966; National Book Award nomination, National Book Foundation, 1971, and National Book Award for fiction, 2003, for The Great Fire; Guggenheim fellow, 1974; National Book Critics Circle Award, American Book Award nomination, and PEN/Faulkner Award nomination, all 1981, for The Transit of Venus; Miles Franklin Award, 2004, and Howells Medal for the most distinguished American novel published in five years' time, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2005, for The Great Fire.

WRITINGS:

Cliffs of Fall, and Other Stories, Knopf (New York, NY), 1963, reprinted, Picador (New York, NY), 2004.

The Evening of the Holiday (novel), Knopf (New York, NY), 1966, reprinted, Picador (New York, NY), 2004.

People in Glass Houses: Portraits from Organization Life (interrelated stories), Knopf (New York, NY), 1967, reprinted, Picador: St. Martin's (New York, NY), 2004.

The Bay of Noon (novel), Atlantic-Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1970, reprinted, Picador (New York, NY), 2003.

Defeat of an Ideal: A Study of the Self-Destruction of the United Nations (nonfiction), Atlantic-Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1973.

The Transit of Venus (novel), Viking (New York, NY), 1980.

Coming of Age in Australia (lectures), Australian Broadcasting Corp. (Sydney, Australia), 1985.

Countenance of Truth: The United Nations and the Waldheim Case (nonfiction), Viking (New York, NY), 1990.

Greene on Capri: A Memoir, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2000.

The Great Fire (novel), Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2003.

Work appears in anthologies, including several volumes of Winter's Tales and O. Henry Prize Stories. Contributor to periodicals, including the New Yorker, Ladies' Home Journal, and McCall's.

ADAPTATIONS: The Great Fire has been adapted as an audio book, Recorded Books, 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: Even before the publication of her best-selling novel The Transit of Venus, Shirley Hazzard's work met with critical approval. For example, Robie Macauley wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Hazzard's The Bay of Noon is "one of those rare novels that tries to address itself to the reader's intelligence rather than his nightmares. Its assumptions are fine and modest: That the reader will enjoy a sense of place if that place is drawn for him so perfectly that it seems to breathe, that the reader will understand a story based on the interactions of personality rather than mere violence, that the reader will take pleasure in a style that is consciously elegant and literary." "People in Glass Houses: Portraits from Organization Life," wrote Laurie Clancy in Contemporary Novelists, "is a brilliantly funny and scathing collection of eight interrelated stories concerning an unnamed 'organization' which is transparently the United Nations."

Regardless, it was with the release of The Transit of Venus that Hazzard gained a wider and more diverse readership. Writing in the Chicago Tribune, Lynne Sharon Schwartz remarked: "If the literary establishment were given to pageantry, [The Transit of Venus] ought to be welcomed with a flourish of trumpets. Last year John Gardner clamored for moral fiction: Here is a book that ventures confidently amid the abiding themes of truth, beauty, goodness, and love, and is informed, moreover, by stringent intelligence and lacerating irony. Hazzard spares no one, not even her reader." Clancy commented that "Hazzard's masterpiece and the basis of her reputation is undoubtedly The Transit of Venus." Clancy added: "The meticulous—sometimes almost too meticulous—craftsmanship of the novel and the elegance and subtle wit of the style are a delight and almost unique among contemporary Australian fiction writers."

Los Angeles Times critic Doris Grumbach wrote that she was very moved by The Transit of Venus. She felt that it "is an impressive, mature novel, full and satisfying, by a novelist whose earlier work—two novels and two collections of stories … did not prepare us for this book. Without fear of exaggeration I can say it is the richest fictional experience I have had in a long time, so sumptuous a repast that it may not be to every reader's taste."

Although characterization plays a vital role in all of her writings, Hazzard exhibits particular skill in this area in The Transit of Venus. Webster Schott pointed out in the Washington Post: "Her purpose is to reveal [the characters] in the act of living and to make their pleasure, anguish and confusion rise out of their personalities as they respond to change." Schott added: "All of The Transit of Venus is human movement, and seen from near the highest level art achieves."

John Leonard suggested in the New York Times that Hazzard's skill not only lies in her characterizations but in her literary style in general. "Miss Hazzard writes as well as Stendhal," Leonard remarked. "No matter the object—a feeling, a face, a room, the weather—it is stripped of its layers of paint, its clots of words, down to the original wood; oil is applied; grain appears, and a glow. Every epigram and apostrophe is earned. A powerful intelligence is playing with a knife. It is an intelligence that refuses to be deflected by ironies; irony isn't good enough."

The feature that several critics have identified as the underlying factor of Hazzard's skillful characterization and literary style is her sensitivity. Schott wrote: "Her perceptions of gesture, voice, attitude bespeak an omniscient understanding of human personality. The story she tells is, for the most part, so usual as to sound irrelevant. What she brings to it is virtually everything that story alone cannot tell about human lives." Similarly, Schwartz remarked that "The Transit of Venus evidences the wisdom of one not only well traveled but well acquainted with truth and falsehood in their numberless guises. Interwoven with the story of Caro's and Grace's lives and loves are a devastating representation of British class structure, with barriers and loopholes clearly marked; an acerbic, satirical view of a governmental bureaucracy that scoops the marrow out of men and leaves them empty bone; a glimpse at underground activists struggling for fundamental political decencies in Latin America, as well as a survey of various modes of contemporary marriage."

After the publication of The Transit of Venus Hazzard released a collection of lectures, Coming of Age in Australia, as well as the nonfiction volume Countenance of Truth: The United Nations and the Waldheim Case. Then, after taking a ten-year break from publishing, she released her memoir Greene on Capri. In it, Hazzard relates the visits she and her husband made to the island of Capri in the Bay of Naples over the course of three decades. The book primarily focuses on some of the close friends they made there, including the noted writer Graham Greene, who was among many artists who lived in or traveled often to Capri. "Hazzard writes evenhandedly of their relationship with the sometimes volatile, contrary and often solitary Greene," wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor. The reviewer went on to note that the author's "precise prose beautifully captures the literary tone of the island." In addition, critics noted that the memoir has many interesting aspects. Robert Murray Davis, writing in World Literature Today, called the memoir "a curiously old-fashioned book," noting that it is not overly detailed or speculative like modern memoirs.

The Great Fire, Hazard's first novel to be published since The Transit of Venus, was widely praised. The story takes place in Japan following World War II, where Aldred Leith, who fought for the British during the war, falls in love with a very young Australian woman still under the guardianship of her parents. The novel focuses on Leith's love for the girl and empathy for her dying brother. The story demonstrates that love is a type of redemption for Leith; following his horrible and emotionally deadening war experience, it allows him to once again feel fully part of the world. John Freeman, writing in People, commented that the author's "sentences twist, turn and fold delicately inward, capturing the way survivors … carefully ration emotions and memories."

Compared to her more famous novel, The Great Fire, has a "broader canvas" noted Anita Brookner in the Spectator. The characters in The Great Fire are set against the overwhelming backdrop that is the war. In-deed, Brookner stated: "This is a novel of high seriousness…. It is the time and place that remain the novel's salient features."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 18, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1981.

Contemporary Novelists, 6th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1982, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1983.

Geering, R.G., Recent Fiction, Oxford University Press (Melbourne, Australia), 1974.

Hazard, Shirley, Greene on Capri: A Memoir, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2000.

PERIODICALS

Antipodes, June, 2004, "The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard. (2004 Miles Franklin Award)," p. 81.

Biography, fall, 2000, David Lodge, review of Green on Capri, p. 803.

Booklist, January 1, 2004, review of The Great Fire, p. 776.

Chicago Tribune, March 9, 1980, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, review of The Transit of Venus.

Library Journal, June 1, 2004, Michael Rogers, review of The Bay of Noon, p. 200; November 1, 2004, Michael Rogers, review of People in Glass Houses, p. 134.

Los Angeles Times, March 9, 1980, Doris Grumbach, review of The Transit of Venus.

New York Times, February 26, 1980, John Leonard, review of The Transit of Venus.

New York Times Book Review, April 5, 1970, Robie Macauley, review of The Bay of Noon; March 16, 1980, Gail Godwin, review of The Transit of Venus, p. 7; May 11, 1980, Michiko Kakutani, "Shirley Hazzard," p. 46; April 29, 1990, Paul Lewis, review of Countentance of Truth: the United Nations and the Waldheim Case, p. 13.

People, December 1, 2003, John Freeman, review of The Great Fire, p. 49.

Publishers Weekly, February 2, 1990, Genevieve Stuttaford, review of Countenance of Truth, p. 70; March 9, 1990, Wendy Smith, "Shirley Hazzard; in Life as in Art, It's the Individual and the Truth that Matter Most to This Author," p. 48; January 3, 2000, review of Green on Capri, p. 65.

Spectator, November 15, 2003, Anita Brookner, review of The Great Fire, p. 60.

Washington Post, March 9, 1980, Webster Schott, review of The Transit of Venus.

World Literature Today, autumn, 2000, Robert Murray Davis, review of Green on Capri, p. 830.