Show Notes
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. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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