The Transit Of Venus (Virago Modern Classics)

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Reissued this March by Penguin Classics with a new introduction by Lauren Groff, the new edition is a treat for new fans drawn in by the critical revival surrounding the publication of Hazzard’s collected stories last year. The Transit of Venus (1980) was the greatest of her three novels, which include The Great Fire (2003) and The Bay of Noon (1970). Implicitly defending Hazzard against a rude prepublication review in Publishers Weekly, which called her stories “quaint antiques from a bygone time,” Gregory, Groff, and other Hazzard advocates have praised her flair as a worldbuilder while marveling at the strangeness of her place in the culture. Hazzard, who was born in Australia in 1931, wore her hair in a bouffant until her death in 2016, for example, and maintained a similar defiance against casualness or trendy novelty in her fiction, which have given her the odd reputation of a relic of a bygone literary era. Reading The Transit of Venusone could not fail to notice the quality of the writing. The novel’s plot is skilfully managed and the tension is held to the final chapter. Some of the sentences are beautifully constructed. Look at what she wrote about Grace’s reaction to the departure of her would-be lover quoted above. And as I typed Caro’s reflections I noted the provisionality of the sentences: ‘not clear now’, ‘not quite certain’, ‘might have missed the point’.

Hazzard was born in Sydney on 30 January 1931 to a Welsh father and Scottish mother who worked for the company building the Sydney Harbour Bridge, where they met. She went to Queenwood School for Girls, but left the country with her family in 1947, moving to Hong Kong, Italy and New Zealand before making a home in New York, where she pursued a career at the United Nations through the 1950s. My Transit has a happy ending,” she said. “The stage is littered with bodies, but it is a happy ending.” With these prospects and impressions, Grace Marian Thrale, forty-three years old, stood silent in a hotel doorway, with the roar of existence in her ears. And like any great poet or tragic sovereign of antiquity, cried on her Creator and wondered how long she must remain on such an earth. (289) The two writers met by chance at a cafe in Capri in the 1960s. Hazzard was seated close enough to overhear Greene reciting The Lost Mistress by Robert Browning to a friend. Greene had stalled on the last lines, so Hazzard supplied them on her way out. They were seated together by chance at a restaurant that evening and an enduring, if turbulent, friendship began. Hazzard has never had a big reputation as a political writer, but her anti-authoritarian, anti-imperial, and generally anti-bureaucratic politics hold a special appeal in our own apocalyptic times. As Caro’s story develops and the years pass—the novel stretches late into the twentieth century and deep into the Australian sisters’ middle age—an acid commentary on American and British hegemony in global politics develops.

On the Old World, History lay like a paralysis. In France, the generals died. In Italy, a population abandoned the fields forever, to make cars or cardigans in factories; and economists called this a miracle.

Shirley Hazzard understands that our lives are influenced by both predictability and chance, by those we meet and the moment we meet them. The important thing is what we do with our experiences: perhaps use them to manipulate others as Dora does. She turns every situation into a story of wrong being done to Dora. She is the saddest of all the characters.Caro’s life has also contained much hurt and loss. She had not remained a spectator, but engaged with the experiences life sent her with dignity, reflection and generosity. Hazzard has never had a big reputation as a political writer, but her anti-authoritarian, anti-imperial, and generally anti-bureaucratic politics hold a special appeal in our own apocalyptic times.