Who is shirley hazzard

It was through friends at the New Yorker that Hazzard met Steegmuller, himself a novelist, as well as a translator of Flaubert and the biographer of Jean Cocteau and other French writers. The matchmaker was Muriel Spark , who introduced the couple at a party in He was 25 years older and had been married before.

Conversation with Hazzard was always likely to return to what Francis thought about this or that, or what she had told him after witnessing some curiosity in Capri, or in Naples, where they also kept a house. In , she published a collection of dispatches from Naples, The Ancient Shore , with Steegmuller named as co-author his contribution describes a mugging and the subsequent treatment by doctors and police.

The couple accrued a distinguished art collection — Picasso and Matisse hung in the hallway of her Manhattan apartment — which Hazzard intended to bequeath to a museum. It was evident that Greene played a dominant role in her life, even though she shuddered when recalling an act of mischief or malevolence.

Greene on Capri: A Memoir not only describes the friendship, which despite its turbulent character endured for more than 20 years, but offers a succinct account of the island as an artistic haven in the 19th and 20th centuries.

She was troubled, however, by corrupt practices in land purchase and development intruding from Naples. At the National Book awards ceremony in , Hazzard found herself provoked into a spontaneous defence of highbrow literature against the populism which, she felt, had come to dominate the TV screen and the bestseller list.

Stephen King, who preceded her, had taken the assembled literati to task for its critical neglect of writers such as John Grisham, Tom Clancy and himself. An intensification of life. In , she was made an honorary citizen of Capri. Shirley Hazzard obituary. They are the same thing. See all Shirley Hazzard's quotes ».

Please vote for the book you would like to read and discuss. By voting for a book you are implicitly promising to read the book and participate in the discussion if it wins. The poll will be open until August The discussion will start on September The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard. Grove by Esther Kinsky. The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel. Rainbow Milk by Paul Mendez. Sign in to vote ». Topics Mentioning This Author. Welcome back. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account.

The sentences of shocking wisdom appear freakishly often. The intelligence is relentless. When it was winter in Australia, it was summer everywhere that seemed to count. Her early education was conducted at a school that primed its young charges with poetry, but it soon became impossible to ignore the conflagration that had overtaken Europe and the Pacific.

Already Hazzard was familiar with the wounded veterans of the Great War who hobbled down the streets of Sydney, and, as a child, she had once been evacuated to the countryside with her fellow-students. Hiroshima was a wasteland when Hazzard arrived there at the age of sixteen, less than two years after the attack.

After her sister contracted tuberculosis, the family relocated to New Zealand. Like one of her fictional U. The couple settled in Manhattan but spent half of every year in Capri. In an act of treasonous grooming, she wore her hair pinned up in a bouffant through the late nineteen-sixties and seventies. She spoke in a muted British accent that was the muddied average of all the English-speaking countries in which she had lived. With far-flung origins, an itinerant coming of age, and a husband a quarter century her senior, Hazzard lived a life remote from those of her contemporaries.

She disliked television and, later, literary theory and personal computers. Yet, if the turbulence of privileged spheres feels familiar, the intensity and precision of her focus does not. The intellectual thrill of her work arises from her ability to describe the small, constituent particles of emotional matter we typically consider irreducible. I first read the book two years ago and have reread it five times since, finishing it always with the impression that something very real and a little beyond language has happened to me.

In this way— Was it like this for you, too? Ted Tice, a young man carrying a decaying suitcase, appears at the door of his future employer, an arrogant astronomer of wealth and stature. Ted falls in love with the dark sister, Caroline, who herself is in love with Paul Ivory, a manipulative playwright engaged to an aristocrat from a nearby manor. Caroline, known as Caro, has an affair with Paul and, when it ends, is overtaken by a desperate depression.

She is rescued by a gallant American of virtuous pursuits, whom she marries.