Elizabeth Harrower and Shirley Hazzard only met six times. They wrote to each other for 40 years

Elizabeth Harrower (L) and Shirley Hazzard have left us an intriguing double self-portrait to complement their magnificent, hard-won books. Photograph: The Guardian

Elizabeth Harrower’s trip to Italy in 1984 should have been pure joy. She was invited by her friends Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller to join them, at their expense, in Rome, Naples, Capri and then New York.

The couple wanted to thank Harrower for her years of care for Hazzard’s mother, through mental illness and decline in Sydney, and they had been urging her – pleading with her – for years.