| Chapter : | Introduction |
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It is difficult to overstate the significance of Italy in Hazzard’s life and writing. Italy is aligned with art and literature as vital and animating forces that engender the very possibility of reading and writing and that are inseparable from Hazzard’s sense of her own affect-charged agency:
It was a great revelation. It was like going to heaven…. [Naples is] a terribly poor city now and it was a desperately poor city then, and yet when I entered that city I knew that it was a coup de foudre. I knew that this was where I wanted to be. Bit by bit I began to have this great companion, the city of Naples, and of course to learn all sorts of things there—to change my way of looking at things, to enlarge my way of looking at things. The year passed with as much interior development in me as the previous four or five years and perhaps even more. For one thing, I became joyful … really for the first time I knew what joy was. It became a part of my life, I understood at last what that was.…
I saw life even in the midst of so much difficulty and suffering. It had vitality, there was blood in the veins and it was quite a different life from the life I’d been accepting and had even begun teaching myself to accept as a necessary and rightful thing. (Garrett 38–39)
For Giovanna Capone, the concurrence of Hazzard’s arrival in Italy with the start of her writing career, coupled with the overlap between these biographical events and the experiences of the protagonist of The Bay of Noon, suggests the matter of the Anglo-Italian romance:
A parallel almost immediately suggests itself between the protagonist-writer of this novel and E.M. Forster’s Lucy of A Room with a View. In both cases the theme is one of regeneration: when Hazzard stated her new way of feeling as being “restored to life,” echoes of Forster were there. With Lucy, “Italy worked some marvel on her. It gave her light, and … it gave her shadow,” and the novel further comments: “Italy was offering her the most priceless of all possessions—her own soul.” (Capone 173)
Italy constitutes for Hazzard, moreover, the fulcrum of a trajectory incorporating flight from antipodean and filial entrapment to the autonomy of