Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist B ...

and that was very interesting, apart from everything else. And I began to look at life in that light. (Garrett 38)

Hazzard’s sense of the alignment of literature and interiority, clarified for her by time in Italy, is also expressed in negative terms in relation to her childhood:

One of the complaints made against the Australia of my childhood in the 1930s and 1940s was that people were looking outside Australia for their culture. However, an imaginative child will sometimes live in books and it is true that the best books came from other places; it wasn’t just cultural snobbery. It wasn’t a case of “looking elsewhere.” One was really looking into one’s own heart. (Dutton 51)

Hazzard is at great pains, then, to differentiate sharply her own agency from the conventional positions then available to young women by foregrounding creativity and cosmopolitan mobility as decisive in her life story. What she provides is, nonetheless, very much a story; it is marked by the particular vitality of fiction and deeply vested in the forms of romance—the sense of benighted entrapment, the push of youth to secure freedom, the glories of flight, and the achievement, hard won, of lifelong happiness:

There was the idea that transformation in our lives would come through marriage, through falling in love and marrying, and the idea of rescue, which I still think has great appeal, went on for a very long time in our lives. I would have liked to be rescued but no one was going to rescue me, and I finally realised I have to rescue myself. And the only means of rescuing myself that I could see was to use the thing that was closest to my spirit, which was the literary life, the use of the word.…

I can say I lived happily ever after. (Lawson)

The Italy found in Hazzard’s fiction, however, is in no sense an idealised or abstracted construction of Anglo-Italian nostalgia. As I argue in chapter 3, the concern throughout her Italian novels is with Italy’s postfascist