Harwood, John 1946-

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HARWOOD, John 1946-

PERSONAL: Born 1946, in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. Education: Graduate of University of Tasmania and Cambridge University.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Harcourt, 6277 Sea Harbor Dr., Orlando, FL 32887.

CAREER: Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia, former professor of English.

WRITINGS:

Olivia Shakespear and W. B. Yeats: After Long Silence, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1989.

Eliot to Derrida: The Poverty of Interpretation, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1995.

The Ghost Writer (novel), Harcourt (Orlando, FL), 2004.

Also author of poetry, satire, and political writings.

SIDELIGHTS: John Harwood is a retired English professor whose first books include a study of the relationship between Olivia Shakespear and William Butler Yeats and a critique of literary critics. His debut novel, The Ghost Writer, is set in his homeland of Australia and begins with young Gerard Freeman snooping in his mother's bedroom. Gerard finds a key that unlocks a dresser drawer, which contains a book, some loose manuscript pages, and the photograph of a beautiful woman. His mother, Phyllis, angrily attacks him when she finds him with her hidden cache. It is years before Gerard discovers why she was so furious and while, all his life, she had been overprotective of him and warned him of a world filled with danger.

As a young boy, Gerard heard the stories of his mother's childhood in England, but he never learned why she left for Australia. The adolescent Gerard receives a letter inviting him to correspond with a pen pal, and he is soon writing to Alice Jessell, who tells him that she is wheelchair-bound and living in Sussex, England. They correspond but do not exchange pictures. Gerard dreams of Alice, and when he goes back to the drawer, he finds only the book, which contains a ghost story by V. H., who, unknown to him, is his grandmother Viola Hatherly. The picture of Seraphina, the subject of the story, is exactly as he dreamed Alice to be.

After his mother dies, the adult Gerard travels to England, but he is unable to convince Alice to see him. He visits a long-abandoned house, discovers more stories by Viola, and realizes that they describe events that occurred after they were written and are strangely linked to his own life. "He'll become aware that there's something very odd about the elusive Alice Jessell, whose name, he realizes, echoes that of the ghostly Miss Jessel in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw," noted Charles Matthews, reviewing The Ghost Writer for the San Jose Mercury News. Matthews added that Harwood's ghost story "owes more than a little to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray."Ina review for the Age Online, James Bradley wrote that The Ghost Writer "folds its interwoven stories back into one another, creating an Escher-like loop within itself and posing other, less easily answered questions about the power of stories to make us into what we are." Boston Globe contributor Hallie Ephron called the novel "a first-class creeper, a literary ghost story in the Victorian tradition…. Present, past, and ghost story fuse into a single terrifying truth in this richly evocative, satisfying novel." A Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded that Harwood's novel "links textual investigation and sublimated passion, building to a satisfying, unexpected ending."