REMEMBERING ELIZABETH HARROWER – HELEN TRINCA

After publishing four books that earned the admiration of Patrick White, Shirley Hazzard and Christina Stead, Elizabeth Harrower published no more novels. She faded from the literary landscape, until being rediscovered decades later to international acclaim. Helen Trinca has now written her story in Looking for Elizabeth – The Life of Elizabeth Harrower. On Monday 21 July 2025, at The Sydney Institute, she joined writer and poet Geoffrey Lehmann, who knew Harrower, to reflect on Harrower as a force in writing circles.

REMEMBERING ELIZABETH HARROWER

HELEN TRINCA

When I published a piece in The Australian recently about the friendship between Patrick White and Elizabeth Harrower I was reminded of the place the Nobel Prize winner holds in the hearts and minds of Australian booklovers. Indeed, White is one of the few household names in literature and there was strong interest in the piece which looked at whether or not he “bullied” Harrower – a writer who is not a household name, despite some critics arguing her work is right up there with his.

Theirs was a complex relationship and one that intrigued readers, proving once again the deep interest in the lives – as well as the work – of novelists. It’s a curiosity that goes well beyond interest in gossip; revelations about the White-Harrower friendship go some way to explaining why Harrower stopped writing – arguably at the peak of her powers in her 40s.

The revelation that White’s support and encouragement were at times too much for Harrower, arguably adding to her “writer’s block”, is detailed in my biography, Looking for Elizabeth: The Life of Elizabeth Harrower (La Trobe University Press, in conjunction with Black Inc. July 2025).

It covers her 92 years, from her birth to a working class family in Newcastle in 1928 to her death in July 2020 and offers a portrait of a woman who had many, often contradictory, sides to her character and personality.

Harrower was open, curious, conversational, but also guarded. She was a mystery to many of her friends over the years who knew her as both sociable and yet secretive about much of her past. She was a mystery too to a reading public and an academic fan base who could never fathom just why she stopped writing in the late 1970s.

By then she had written five books and several short stories. By 1966, four novels had been published to critical acclaim even if they did not become best-sellers, but the fifth novel, In Certain Circles, was held back by Harrower. Apart from a few short stories published in magazines and newspapers in the 1970s, Harrower did not write again.

Over the decades she would give different answers to the big question of why she had pulled the novel on the eve of its publication, but there was inevitably a sense of unfinished business about her life and work.

As it turned out, Harrower was immensely lucky; she had a second crack at fame when Michael Heyward and Penny Hueston at Text Publishing in Melbourne “rediscovered” her novels and republished them, starting in 2012. Michael and Penny, who have made it their business to revive the “lost novels” of Australian writers in the Text Classics series, not only published her backlist, but eventually convinced Harrower to allow them to publish In Certain Circles for the first time.

Harrower was in her mid-80s and these were golden years – she was interviewed by journalists like me, she was acclaimed at writers’ festivals, she attracted glowing reviews from international critics and when one of her short stories Alice was published in The New Yorker.

Harrower, who throughout her life had seen herself as a “global” rather than “Australian” writer and, who had read “everything” – from the Russians to the latest 21^st Century American fiction – was knocked out by the recognition.

For years she had lived a quiet life on the lower North Shore as more and more of her great friends including Christina Stead and Patrick White and Kylie Tennant died; and as she lost touch with others, such as Shirley Hazzard.

Now she was hot property, sought after for interviews and chats and the recipient finally of the literary prize short-listings she had missed out on in the 1960s.

I was part of this new fan club, and interviewed and spoke informally to Harrower many times after our first meeting in 2012. The Australian’s Review then-editor Deborah Hope assigned me to interview Harrower ahead of the republication of her second novel, The Long Prospect. I had never heard of Harrower but loved the book. It was 50 years old but incredibly modern in tone and theme. Interviewing Harrower on that morning in 2012 in her fairly bland apartment in Cremorne on Sydney’s North Shore, was a memorable experience.

I can still see her, talk, upright and grand, yet friendly. Her natural reticence, what the New Yorker writer and critic, James Wood, once called her “wounded wisdom”, was apparent. She was on the surface open and a good interviewee, but she avoided the personal questions about her childhood and inquiries about whether The Long Prospect was autobiographical. As she acknowledged in another interview, she was much better at interrogation than being interrogated and was adept at turning the conversation away from her life and times.

From that first meeting, I was keen to understand what made Harrower tick, to understand the links between her childhood and her books and to what situated her in mid-20^th Century Australia when she was working on her novels. But it was another decade, in 2023, when, armed with a publishing contract, I began seriously “looking for Elizabeth” in her letters and papers in the National Library of Australia and the Mitchell Library and in talking to her friends and relatives.

It has been an enriching journey of research: Harrower might have stopped writing, but she left a lot of words behind her in the hundreds of letters she wrote throughout her life. She was a true “word child” and she used the written word to make sense of her life and the lives of others.

She was a voracious reader – almost arrogant about the books she had read by the time she was a young adult – and an indefatigable correspondent and keeper of diaries. She had some great correspondents of course – many of you will know the famous exchanges she had with Shirley Hazzard over their 30-plus years of friendship. Those are wonderfully rich letters and offer a very full portrait of Harrower’s daily life, her political interests, the books that shaped her – and the anxieties, the fears, and the grudges that she experienced.

The Hazzard-Harrower correspondence is revealing and rich but they are only a small part of the letters she wrote over decades. One slab that definitely merits more work is her correspondence with Nancy Phelan – both of these women found it hard to write a short letter so there are a lot of words! There are smaller collections of letters to people like Christina Stead, Judah Waten and Max Harris that were also important sources of information in the mapping of Harrower’s life.

Sadly, she tore up a lot of the most important letters – the ones she wrote and the ones she received from her mother in the several years in the 1950s when she lived in London and her mother lived in Sydney. I discovered just a couple of letters from her mother – and they are indeed precious, giving a real insight to the warmth in that relationship and also revealing Elizabeth’s vulnerability and uncertainty, even as a woman in her 30s.

The loss of the letters to and from her mother leaves a great gap in what we know about the 20-something Elizabeth in those formative London years. You feel like weeping when you think of what they might contain, of what we might have learnt about Harrower’s life as a 20-something in the UK.

Equally sad is that Elizabeth also seems to have torn up letters she wrote to Kylie Tennant when once again Elizabeth was in London in 1972 and Kylie was back home in Sydney and the Blue Mountains. And these letters, which Elizabeth retrieved from Kylie, were important because they would, I believe, have revealed the depth of emotion that Harrower felt for Tennant. Their friendship which began in the 1960s, was known to their contemporaries but has been overshadowed in recent years by news of Harrower’s relationship with the famous Shirley Hazzard.

Hazzard remains a significant literary figure but Tennant, so much better known in Australia in her day than Hazzard could ever claim to be, has slipped out of sight. Even my generation is more likely to know Tennant’s name than to have read any of her work. For a few years in the 1960s and 1970s, these two women were incredibly close. They bought a Blue Mountains weekender together and Elizabeth was a fixture in the household of Kylie, her husband Roddy and their two children.

Tennant was very well known for her writing, her public commentary through her newspaper columns and short pieces. She was a larger than life figure in the Sydney literary scene, celebrated for her books that merged fiction and journalism and were unabashed in their advocacy for the poor, for the “battlers”. She had a reputation for gathering “material” by living the life of the people she wrote about. As a young woman, she went on long treks through the country to gather stories, she lived in dreadful housing in inner Sydney; she even went to jail – all in pursuit of the story.

Harrower, it seems, was in love with her and the complexity of their friendship arguably contributed to Harrower’s “writer’s block” in the early 1970s. Yet when she was in her 80s, Harrower revealed little about that time and almost skated over her connection to Tennant. It was a shock to discover in my research just how important Tennant had been in her life.

I’ve pieced that story together from letters and argue it was the most intense emotional relationship in Harrower’s life. Whether or not it was also a gay relationship is another question!

There were others who contributed to Harrower’s distraction from her writing life. Shirley Hazzard and her mother Kit can be blamed because they were so demanding of Elizabeth’s time in sorting practical issues and running “errands”; Patrick White can be blamed for overdoing the encouragement.

Hazzard and White were big intellectual supports and Elizabeth loved their attention and their conversations but ultimately each of these great writers can be seen to have had a negative influence on her confidence and ability to carve out a writing “space” for herself.

Kylie’s contribution to Elizabeth’s woes was more subtle. As I write in the book, the difficulties in their friendship which would ultimately lead to a distancing, rather than a severing, coincided with Harrower’s struggles with In Certain Circles and her decision to veto its publication. The Kylie/Elizabeth story is just one of the many layers in her very long life – so many friends, so many stories, and so many letters.

Thank God for her letters, thank God for that period of recent history when people used their typewriters in the same way that later generations picked up the phone to stay in touch. Back then, Elizabeth would slide an aerogramme or a sheet of notepaper into her typewriter in the morning, start a conversation, answer a few questions posed by her correspondent and then and go shopping, only to return to the letter a few hours or even a day later.

She wrote with precision and warmth, her letters were an essential part of how she stayed in touch and also how she made sense of her life. We are lucky that she was not only a speedy touch typist but that she had the time – given that she did not really have to work by her middle-age – to detail her life to her friends.

Her books are terrific – and they tell us a great deal about her inner and external worlds – but her extensive correspondence, her oral histories and other recordings over the years, along with the late-life interviews are truly revelatory. Elizabeth shines through these words she wrote even if simply relating the most recent movie she has seen.

She was a great writer, one who was not really capable of a poor sentence, but it is in her fiction that we see the prime motivating force of her life. Here are the concluding lines to my biography.

From her earliest, complicated and often unhappy years, Harrower sensed the real meaning of life was the search for meaning. She had suffered emotional turmoil, but her struggle was with what lay beneath the here and now. Throughout her life, the big question that excited her, personally and professionally, was not how or what or where, but why? She asked it of herself and of others… Harrower had always had an acute sense of the reality of the human experience. She saw clearly that “certain sufferings and sorrows are absolutely unavoidable”…..Elizabeth Harrower was not averse to the pleasures of eating and drinking and other frivolous pastimes, which she referred to as “shopping for clothes”. But the pursuits that so defined Western societies after World War II were never the main game for her. Harrower worked a different canvas. She looked for happiness – as fleeting as it might be – in understanding people. The little girl from Newcastle, who always believed her duty was to pass on messages about the world, became the writer who did just that in her small but perfectly formed bundle of novels and short stories.