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...
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Critical Essay by Brigid Brophy
The 10 substantial stories in Cliffs of Fall are almost without imagery and description, their vehicle being dialogue and simple reportage of gesture. The characters a...
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Critical Essay by John Leonard
"The Transit of Venus" is not a perfect novel. One important character—a handsome, intelligent, heroic American—simply isn't credible...
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Critical Essay by Laurie Stone
Marjorie Morningstar is about a curious and good-looking woman whose destiny is entirely wrapped up in the men she chooses. First she picks a flashily sexy but soft-at-...
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Critical Essay by Webster Schott
[The Transit of Venus] unfolds in rural England, the Chelsea district of London, Japan, the Algarve of Portugal, New York City, Chile and Stockholm. Therefore it evok...
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Critical Essay by Gail Godwin
This engrossing, masterly novel ["The Transit of Venus"] is shaped with an admirable blend of substance and economy. It combines the satisfaction of a fami...
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Critical Essay by Martha Heimberg
At the center of … The Transit of Venus is the adventurous life story and passionate love story of Caroline Bell, a dark-haired, Australian-born beauty whose ...
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Critical Essay by Don M. Wolfe
The ten stories collected [in Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories] reveal a many-faceted if unextended talent concentrated mainly on the portrayal of woman acutely vulnera...
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Critical Essay by Patricia Macmanus
Both in style and substance, the finely balanced sensibility that characterizes Shirley Hazzard's New Yorker stories pervades The Evening of the Holiday...
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Critical Essay by Laurence Lafore
Shirley Hazzard's writing is like some electronic mechanism, enormously intricate in design and function, charged with great power, but so refined by skill th...
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Critical Essay by Roger Gard
Miss Hazzard is a serious comic writer because of her remarkable sensitivity to, and control of, English…. [Her] heightened consciousness of speech—her gift...
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Critical Essay by Robie Macauley
"The Bay of Noon" is one of those rare novels that tries to address itself to the reader's intelligence rather than his nightmares. Its assumptio...
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Critical Essay by John Colmer
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...
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Critical Essay by R. G. Geering
Shirley Hazzard is … stylish but she … writes with restraint, preferring understatement and implication to explanation and assertion. The controlled sens...
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Critical Essay by Robert Sellick
[Shirley Hazzard has used the phrase 'no-man's land' as] an appropriate correlative to the geographical dislocation which has become such a featu...
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