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

This creates a complex narrative ethic for the novel, with the movement towards truth that sits so dramatically at the heart of the story complicated and troubled by questions of chronology and sequence and by the telos of revelation and understanding. This narrative ethic is perhaps summed up best in the comment made by Hazzard’s husband, Francis Steegmuller, by way of compliment when he read the finished manuscript: “He said to me, ‘No one should have to read it for the first time’” (Wyndham 32).

In addition to their back-and-forth biographical resonances, these three pieces also share a concern with the representation of the interior spaces of the self, understood in light of the harsh terrain of domestic and colonial geographies. They thus highlight the specific topographies of the process of departure and arrival dramatised both in Hazzard’s biography through the passage from Australia to New York via Hong Kong and in her repeated fictional narratives of youthful escape from family constraint. In all three of these stories, the narrator or focalising consciousness stands in youthful relation to those around her, making sense of the world in which she does not feel at home either as a literal child, a substitute child, or an improperly younger lover. In all three pieces, that world is codified and formative, represented through the bounded space of the maternal or of the island, which of course represents the colonial world most particularly.

“Woollahra Road” is remarkable first of all as the only sustained treatment in Hazzard’s oeuvre of a young child as character or narrative perspective; despite the focus on familial and domestic space, there are almost no children in her novels and stories. Instead, that dimension is occupied—and to an extent inverted—throughout by the trope of precocity. Therefore the focalisation through four-year-old Ida in this story is particular, curious, and partial. The story is, moreover, marked dramatically with Hazzard’s biography through the implicit inscription of her own birth date: “It was 1935, and Ida was four years old” (58). Ida’s preoccupation with her doll sets her decisively at the heart of a fraught maternal space. Her drawing of a house with smoking chimney invokes