Security or self-sabotage? Exiled from their families, Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower followed two very different writing paths

The Letter – Pierre Bonnard (c.1906) Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The publication of the letters between Australian writers Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) and Elizabeth Harrower (1928-2020), edited by literary scholar Brigitta Olubas and journalist Susan Wyndham, provides a picture of mid-century life from the perspectives of two exemplary and, for too long in this country, underappreciated novelists.

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