The shared circumstance of an unhappy childhood did not overcome their opposing temperaments, nor Hazzard’s powerful need to renounce her disappointing family. Her only sibling, sister Valerie, was radically estranged. Her father was a philandering alcoholic, her mother “manic depressive”, and her nation provincialissimo (to use her own description from an interview with Paris Review in 2005). In part, this was because her early family life was one of discord and dysfunction. Remembering Shirley Hazzard: 'art is the only afterlife of which we have evidence'īorn in Sydney in 1931, Shirley Hazzard was a willing and relieved exile from the age of 16, but she was also dogged by both the opportunity and the misery of her putative Australianness. This is particularly the case in the novel’s closing chapter, an affecting elegy crafted beautifully in the silence of memorialisation. There are moments in which the syntax and cadence, in particular, are so like that of her subject that Olubas is asserting another biographical dimension: amplification through the elective affinity of style. Her style reads at times like a Hazzard echo. In her fastidiously detailed account, Olubas exceeds “mere” detail for an aesthetic which honours time’s rearrangement through obsession, projection and a livelier narrative understanding. This story begins with the centrality of symbolic others to the construction of “character” and the social moments in which personal value is called upon bravely to declare itself.īrigitta Olubas’s Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life is a brilliant achievement. Her life itself defends the right to be unfashionable, the value of learning and heterodox opinion, and the wish to preserve, in the space of the “literary”, erudition, complexity, and what might be called the private mystery of any reading encounter.Īs the opening of an extraordinarily rich and detailed biography, the anecdote also signals a kind of structural intelligence in the construction of a life story: the biographer working, as a novelist might, to recognise those odd moments in which the self shows its plenitude. Hazzard’s stance serves as an exemplar of literary integrity.
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