While Shirley Hazzard has many devoted admirers and readers, particularly for her best known novel The Transit of Venus, many would be unaware of her life story. She was a private woman, and because she lived in Europe and America,  Australia had mixed feelings about her - and those mixed feelings were reciprocated.

 

Now, in a superb new biography, literary scholar Brigitta Olubas provides a comprehensive, insightful portrait of a complex woman who was ashamed of her  genteel Sydney origins and her difficult mother, had a lacklustre career at the United Nations but  was reborn when she reached Italy.

 

After several unhappy love affairs she found true harmony with the distinguished biographer Francis Steegmuller; Together they moved in intellectual circles and lived a privileged, cultured life  in New York, Naples and on Capri.

 

Olubas has spent forty years studying Hazzard; the result is arguably the finest Australian biography of the year.

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