In 1966 Elizabeth Harrower was on the brink of literary fame. Critics hailed her fourth book, The Watch Tower, as one of the year\u2019s most important Australian novels, alongside The Solid Mandala by her friend Patrick White. The Sydney Morning Herald\u2019s Harry Kippax wrote that \u201cone can be grateful to have had in twelve months two such additions to the small body of distinguished Australian novels\u201d. An ABC reviewer said Harrower\u2019s \u201cbrilliant\u201d book was \u201cone of the best Australian novels I have read for a long while\u201d.<\/p>\n
Seven years later White won the Nobel prize for literature. By then Harrower had written another novel but withdrawn it from her English publisher, disappointed by his reaction. After some false starts she stopped writing and all but disappeared for the next 40 years \u2013 before being rediscovered, unexpectedly, when she was in her 80s.<\/p>\n
So it won\u2019t be surprising if you haven\u2019t heard of Harrower. But as her biographer I\u2019m here to recommend her timeless, quietly devastating studies of emotional tyranny: Down in the City (1957), The Long Prospect (1958), The Catherine Wheel (1960), The Watch Tower (1966) and In Certain Circles (2014).<\/p>\n
Harrower in the 1940s. She left for London in 1951. Photograph: Courtesy of the Harrower family<\/p>\n
Harrower was born in 1928 in Newcastle, north of Sydney, a lonely child of divorced parents and grandparents. She escaped her unhappy youth in the 1950s by moving to London, where she wasted nothing of what she had suffered and seen.<\/p>\n
She lived poor and wrote furiously to produce the first three novels, all intense psychological dramas that drew on her family life, her sharp observation of society and her experiences in cold-war, class-ridden England. Although she refused to be labelled a feminist, she was writing about the need for women\u2019s liberation before the term was coined.<\/p>\n
I had not read her books until they were reissued by her local publisher, Text, in 2012-14, followed by In Certain Circles, the novel whose publication she had stopped in 1971. There was a lightning flash of the fame she should have had back then. James Wood, the New Yorker critic, discovered her and wrote, in an admiring five-page review, of \u201cher wounded wisdom, the elegance and strictness and perilous poise of her sentences, the humane understanding, and ceaseless incisions, of her intelligence\u201d.<\/p>\n
Wood couldn\u2019t understand why Harrower had hidden In Certain Circles away with her papers in the National Library of Australia. Neither could Harrower herself, when I interviewed her in 2014. She hadn\u2019t reread the novel about relationships among two sets of siblings divided by class and personality in harbourside Sydney. Significantly, she hadn\u2019t thrown it away either, believing it was well written if imperfect, and might be found after her death.<\/p>\n
\u201cI suppose I have been very good at closing doors and ending things,\u201d she said. \u201cBut the other mystery is why I was so angry, annoyed or self-destructive as to make up my mind that I would spare the world any more of my great thoughts.\u201d<\/p>\n
More questions than answers emerged from the interviews and friendly conversations we had in the years before her death in 2020.<\/p>\n
I spent the next five years piecing together the intriguing story of this private woman: how she became a writer, where her fiction came from, and why she went silent; and why she remained single, devoting herself to friends including White, Kylie Tennant, Christina Stead and Shirley Hazzard\u2019s demanding mother (while Hazzard devoted herself to writing in New York and Capri)<\/a>.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Saved for Later<\/p>\n Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia’s culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Harrower at her home in Cremorne, Sydney, in 2014. Photograph: Mike Bowers\/The Guardian<\/p>\n