Hazzard and Harrower (The Letters)

Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower met in person for the first time in London in 1972, six years after they began a correspondence that would span four decades. They exchanged letters, cards and telegrams and made occasional phone calls between Harrower’ s home in Sydney and Hazzard’ s apartments in New York, Naples and Capri. The two women wrote to each other of their daily lives, of impediments to writing, their reading, politics and, in Hazzard’ s case, her travels. And they wrote about Hazzard’ s mother, for whose care Elizabeth took increasing – and increasingly reluctant – responsibility from the early 1970s (precisely the period when she herself virtually stopped writing). Edited by Brigitta Olubas, Hazzard’ s official biographer, and Susan Wyndham, who interviewed both Hazzard and Harrower, this is an extraordinary account of two literary luminaries, their complex relationship and their times.