Shirley Hazzard Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Martha Heimberg

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 fate carries her across three continents and into the lives of three equally various men in the span of three decades, from the fifties to the eighties.

The incidence of the magical number three cannot be accidental in this carefully constructed, powerfully told tale, which is, in fact, divided by the writer into three climactic units. There is, in addition to the evocation of numerical magic, something quintessentially medieval underlying Hazzard's exquisite prose and detailed painting of her characters and the physical nature which forms them. Not only the title, which refers to a unique astrological phenomenon involving the passage of the planet Venus across the sun, but the many references to physiognomy as a signal to character remind one of the portraiture of...
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