NewSouth Publishing has acquired world rights to Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower: The letters, edited by Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham. A major contribution to the literary canon, this collection unearths a deep and vexed friendship carried out mostly through letters between two of Australia’s greatest writers.
In the ‘golden years’ of Australian literature Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower established themselves as writers of great sensibility and intellect.
‘Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower were both acclaimed writers whose work continues to be admired by readers in Australia and internationally,’ say Olubas and Wyndham.
While their names are familiar, little is known of the deep and often vexed friendship they sustained for forty years beginning in the mid-1960s. They met by letter and their friendship was carried out mostly through correspondence between Harrower’s home in north-shore Sydney and Hazzard’s apartments in Manhattan, Naples and Capri.
‘The women write to each other of their daily lives, of families and friends, other writers, impediments to writing, their reading, politics, and travels. Central to the letters and the friendship is the dark figure of Hazzard’s mother, for whose care Harrower took increasing responsibility, and whose chaos provided an unceasing heartbreak for Hazzard.’
That correspondence, held in archives in Australia and the US, was only released from embargo with the 2020 death of Harrower. Now, for the first time, Olubas and Wyndham will be able to provide a full picture of a complex friendship of two women deeply immersed in the writing cultures of their times, and an extraordinary account of the artistic and political period in which they wrote.
‘At NewSouth we’re all delighted to be publishing these riveting letters that reveal the inner lives – and complex friendship – of two Australian literary giants,’ says NewSouth Executive Publisher Elspeth Menzies.
The correspondence follows a beautiful arc from a cautious beginning, through mutual writerly respect, to mature affection; and then, following a disastrous visit from Elizabeth to Italy in 1984, a cooling off, distance, some reserve, much resentment.
It is a compelling story told by these two extraordinary writers of a vanished literary world, of the complexities and afterlives of friendships, and of the dailiness of the writing life.
Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower: The letters will be published in mid 2024.
About the editors
BRIGITTA OLUBAS is professor of English at the University of New South Wales. She has published widely on modern Australian literature, is the acknowledged expert on the writing of Shirley Hazzard and and the author of Shirley Hazzard: A writing life. She coedited the first collection of essays on the writing of Elizabeth Harrower.
SUSAN WYNDHAM is a journalist and writer. As literary editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and New York correspondent for The Australian newspaper she interviewed Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower. She is the author of Life in His Hands: the true story of a neurosurgeon and a pianist, contributing editor of My Mother, My Father: on losing a parent, and a contributor to several other books.