Peter Parker

Poise and wit: The Collected Stories of Shirley Hazzard reviewed

Hazzard is wonderfully attuned to subtle shifts in moods and feelings, particularly when writing dialogue, at which she excels

Always a pleasure to read: Shirley Hazzard, photographed in 1976. Credit: Getty Images

Shirley Hazzard was in her late twenties when, in 1959, somewhat diffidently, she submitted her first short story to the New Yorker. It was, William Maxwell remembered, ‘an astonishment to the editors, because it was the work of a finished literary artist about whom they knew nothing whatever’, and he immediately accepted it for publication.

Hazzard’s arrival as a fully formed and refreshingly cosmopolitan writer was a result of her peripatetic and often unhappy early life. ‘By the time I was 25, I had emerged from a lot of trouble,’ she recalled. ‘I had also, more interestingly, lived for appreciable periods in six countries and diverse languages.’ She was born in Australia, but her family relocated to Hong Kong, where at the age of 16 she joined the Office of British Intelligence and fell deeply in love with an older colleague. The relationship ended when her family moved on again, to New Zealand. ‘It’s something I can hardly bear even now to think about,’ she said in 2010, ‘the misery of those years.’

A sense of hopelessness infuses her earliest stories, collected in Cliffs of Fall (1963) and largely set among people on holiday in Italy or escaping New York to their ‘place in the country’. They delineate, with sometimes distressing clear-sightedness, love that is wholly or insufficiently requited or has otherwise gone wrong; but this is observed with the writerly poise and sharp wit that marks all Hazzard’s work.

Like Elizabeth Bowen, Hazzard is attentive to subtle shifts in the moods and feelings of her characters, though she said her true influences were Henry Green and Ivy Compton-Burnett, particularly when writing dialogue (which she does brilliantly) because ‘speech — in literature as in life — can crucially suggest what is not said’.

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