Elizabeth Harrower and Shirley Hazzard were among the most admired Australian writers of the 20th century. Since their deaths in the past decade their papers have revealed that they kept up a fascinating correspondence between Sydney, New York and Italy for 40 years. 

Hazzard and Harrower: The letters, published by New South in May, charts this riveting and perplexing relationship and the tumultuous times in which they lived.

BroadAgenda editor Ginger Gorman had a chat with the book’s editors, Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham.

What is this book about and why did you write it?

Brigitta and Susan: The book collects the revealing personal correspondence between two of Australia’s most significant writers, Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower.

Hazzard and her husband moved between New York and Italy, while Harrower lived in Sydney. They were brought together by Hazzard’s mentally unwell mother, Kit, who became a friend and increasing dependent of Harrower.

The two writers met only six times, but for 40 years, from the late 1960s into the twenty-first century, they wrote to each other about their public and private lives, their reading and writing, about politics and world events – from strikes and terrorist attacks to the political emergencies of the Whitlam dismissal and Watergate, and the history-making moments of wars and the fall of the Soviet Union.

Hazzard and Harrower are constantly disturbed by the state of the world – corrupt politics, wars, poverty, climate change – all issues that concern us today. They remind us that we have not improved, but also that people have always feared they lived in the worst of times.

The talk about the pleasures, frustrations and sorrows of friendships with writers such as Patrick White, Christina Stead, Kylie Tennant, Muriel Spark and Lilian Hellman.

While Hazzard’s career soared towards publication of her novel The Transit of Venus in 1980, Harrower’s publishing culminated with her acclaimed fourth novel, The Watch Tower in 1966, which, not entirely coincidentally, was the year she met Kit Hazzard. She gradually stopped writing and did not publish again until her books were revived a decade ago by Text Publishing.

Another mystery is the nature of the friendship itself. In later years Harrower spoke critically of Hazzard, saying that she had become very grand, and had exploited her, and that she had not much admired Hazzard’s writing anyway. For her part, Hazzard was appalled at Harrower’s rudeness to her when she visited Hazzard and her husband in Italy. But their letters continued almost to the end of their lives with mutual interest and sympathy.

Bringing these writers to life through their intimate exchanges and distinct voices brings fresh interest and complexity to their writing. Their books are still in print and remain important, relevant stories about women in complicated, often oppressive relationships at a time when independence was hard won.

Tell us about your experience writing this book. Why did you write it and how long did it take? What research did you undertake? 

Brigitta: This book grew out of the Shirley Hazzard biography I published in 2022. I had uncovered Harrower’s letters to Hazzard among the large volume of Hazzard’s papers in the basement of her Manhattan apartment after her death in 2016.

Harrower was probably Hazzard’s most prolific correspondent, and I could see from a quick read through how intimate the letters were. Back in Sydney I spoke to Harrower who had placed Hazzard’s letters to her among her papers at the National Library of Australia, but embargoed until both had died. I suggested that a book of their correspondence would be of great interest to Australian readers, but Harrower replied that she didn’t think I should include Hazzard’s letters, just hers. When her letters were returned to Australia, to the State Library of NSW, under the terms of Hazzard’s will, Harrower put an embargo on them too.

After Harrower’s death in 2020 I had access to the letters of both, and I asked Susan, a literary journalist who had known both writers and was planning a biography of Harrower, to work with me on editing and publishing the correspondence.

Susan: I had been interested in Hazzard and Harrower for many years when Brigitta asked me to co-edit the letters. We worked for more than a year on the book, which was more work than you might think. Brigitta transcribed Shirley’s letters, I transcribed Elizabeth’s, about 400,000 words in total. We then sat together making cuts and more cuts, over many months, aiming to create a compelling narrative that flowed and represented their lives and interests.

The letters sometimes alluded to people and events they didn’t explain, so I spent weeks at the National Library in Canberra looking for answers – it was fascinating detective work.

I also continued my research for my planned biography of Harrower, including interviews with many people who knew her. All this, and Brigitta’s earlier research for her biography, informed our editing and contributed to our introduction.

Brigitta: We edited down that huge word count to a little over a quarter of that, first individually, then in long editing sessions that stretched over two or three days at a time through 2023, in one or other of our living rooms.

We agreed and disagreed, then agreed again over what to include, which details were needed, which could be cut. We laughed at almost everything Hazzard’s mother said and did, and at the cruel barbs lobbed by Patrick White at Hazzard (all dutifully passed along by Elizabeth). It was a strangely sociable experience, almost as if we were becoming acquainted with the writers themselves. It was a long and wearying process, but an extraordinary privilege.

Why were you interested in these two writers and how did you know them?

Brigitta: My interest was through my academic work in Australian Literature and my research on women writers who have been neglected or undervalued. I did my Masters on Shirley Hazzard, and over the years have written, edited and published books on both writers.

I visited Hazzard several times in New York to interview her and sort through her papers, and I organised a symposium on her writing which she attended not long before she became frail with age and dementia.

Harrower, too, was helpful with my Hazzard biography. She also came to the launch of a book of essays on her own work that I edited with my colleague Elizabeth McMahon. She was very pleased, even though she was quite deaf and didn’t hear much of what we said.

Susan: I had interviewed both writers as a journalist and became friendly with them without ever knowing about their relationship. I wrote a profile of Shirley Hazzard in New York in 1994, after spending an afternoon with her and her husband, the American writer Francis Steegmuller. Years later my husband and I travelled to Italy with her, a wonderful trip from Rome to Naples and Capri enhanced by her gracious and erudite hosting.

My first knowledge of Elizabeth Harrower came in 1996 when she won the Patrick White Award and I interviewed her by phone. The next time I interviewed her was when her four novels from the 1950s were reissued as Text Classics, and Text published the last novel she had written but put away in 1971. We got on so well that I often went for afternoon tea at her apartment above Sydney Harbour.

Hazzard and Harrower were women of my mother’s age, which interested me. It took great determination for women of that generation to self-educate and become internationally recognised writers against the odds of being female, Australian and from unhappy families. Hazzard did not have children, Harrower was unmarried and childless in her determination to be independent. Both created themselves and hid what they did not want known, all circumstances that are reflected in their fiction. We owe them the respect to keep reading their brilliant books.

Is there anything else you’d like to say?

Susan and Brigitta: It was a great pleasure to read these beautifully written and typed letters, both as insights into history and as physical artefacts. What good fortune that they kept them for decades and put them with their papers. Libraries are important places. Such collections will be rare or nonexistent in future as people use email and more ephemeral forms of communication.

• Picture at top: Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower in Look & Listen Magazine, 1984. Photo by Martin Webby. Courtesy Australian Broadcasting Corporation Library Sales