Shirley Hazzard's fiction is known and admired for its complexly bourgeois pleasures and interests, its internal personal and symbolic dynamics and complexities. However, also important to Hazzard are what she calls, according to Peter Fuller (The...

WHEN SHIRLEY HAZZARD won the National Book Award last month for The Great Fire, she confessed, in her acceptance speech, a near-total ignorance of contemporary culture. This was hardly a surprise to anyone who's read The Great Fire: The book shows no imprint whatsoever...

HILLEL ITALIE, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS The Record (Bergen County, NJ) 10-09-2003 For Shirley Hazzard, transit from 'Venus' took decades By HILLEL ITALIE, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Date: 10-09-2003, Thursday Section: ENTERTAINMENT Edtion: All Editions.=.Late Edition. Early Edition Biographical: SHIRLEY HAZZARD Shirley Hazzard...

Shirley Hazzard is … stylish but she … writes with restraint, preferring understatement and implication to explanation and assertion. The controlled sensitivity of her prose gives even to her love stories a slightly detached air. We share the heroine's consciousness, through which the story comes to us, without wanting to identify with her. The artistic detachment is, of course, more obvious in the satirical People in Glass Houses. But, whether in satirical vein or not, Shirley Hazzard ...

In its poignant but clear-sighted exploration of the birth and decay of love, the loss of innocence, and the painful process of self-discovery through love, [the fiction of Shirley Hazzard] seems to take its inspiration from continental models, from Benjamin Constant, from Chekhov and Turgenev, while in its regard for economy of means and perfection of phrase it surely owes much to Maupassant and Flaubert. In its concern with distinguishing true from false values, spontaneous from conventional codes of beha...

[Shirley Hazzard has used the phrase 'no-man's land' as] an appropriate correlative to the geographical dislocation which has become such a feature of our own world and times. The importance of this sense of geographical dislocation is evident in all her work to date: it is common to many of the stories in her first collection, Cliffs of Fall (1963), but more particularly in the two novellas The Evening of the Holiday (1966) and The Bay of Noon (1970). At a quite superficial level it is...