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

periodisation into a figure of engagement. Within this context, the move these lectures stage from past to present bespeaks generosity and openness—“the gifts and lessons of the past.” This image of learning and learnedness as an embodied and human conversation with an imagined other is formed from Hazzard’s cosmopolitan, internationalist biography. It informs in important ways the modes of her political and public writing, as argued in chapter 1.

Thus for Hazzard, just as geographical location is configured through the rubrics of mobility, transit, and transposition, so too historical time is inflected minutely by a (monumental) sense of human history, as if she literally cannot imagine her own world outside these perspectives. This makes the worlds she describes at once familiar and strikingly new. Apart from the “no-place” of the United Nations, the topography of which is both unmistakable and unspecified throughout the satirical collection of People in Glass Houses, Hazzard writes only occasionally about New York, where she has lived for over half a century. Hong Kong, on the other hand, appears as an insistent, emphatic location in her most recent novel, The Great Fire, its reality at once determined by a colonial, Conradian lens but also representing a site of return, reiteration, resistance. For Hazzard, Hong Kong is a tear in the biographical fabric stretched from the Antipodes to Italy, from youthful confinement to adult autonomy, a break in the narrative flow of biography, the flow of a life recollected.

In light of this, and by way of concluding this introductory account of Hazzard’s writing, I now focus on three of her early writings, three pieces tracking directly her departure from Australia at age sixteen and her time in Hong Kong, that anticipate and provide the matter of her writerly self-creation. All three were published in The New Yorker: her first published story from 1961, “Woollahra Road”; “Canton More Far,” published in 1967; and “Sir Cecil’s Ride” from 1974. The pieces (the second two fall somewhere between narrative and reportage) signal youthfulness and earliness in drawing on material from Hazzard’s own early life. Moreover, because none of the three has since been republished—unusual