Elizabeth Harrower – the greatest Australian writer you've never heard of

Spectator

14 hours ago

Elizabeth Harrower (1928-2020) became an Australian literary classic before she had fully established herself as an Australian writer. She had a rough childhood in Newcastle, New South Wales, and once contemplated lying on the road in the dead of night waiting to be run over. She described herself as a 'divorced child', saw her father Frank very rarely, despite his best efforts, and felt an inexorable loneliness during her days in the industrial city by the sea. Later she found herself in Scotland and loved it; and for much of the 1950s she lived in London.
Returning to Australia, she enjoyed what seems like a romantic friendship with the novelist and playwright Kylie Tennant, a rollicking yarnspinner of a realist, though Tennant was appalled by the idea of her sitting in her room writing some horror story about a man. The book in question was her fourth novel, The Watchtower, and by the time it was published in 1966 Harrower was enjoying a close intimacy with Patrick White, who would be awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature. White was so intent on Harrower gaining recognition by winning the Miles Franklin award that he asked for his own entry, The Solid Mandala (the least successful of his major novels), to be withdrawn. But The Watchtower failed to win anyway.
That novel, in all its black glory, was in fact the last piece of fiction that Harrower published, since she withdrew her next book, In Certain Circles, despite the fact that she had a publisher for it. Harrower's current reputation as a figure of interest has followed in the wake of Text Publishing not only reprinting the earlier books but finally publishing In Certain Circles in 2014.
All of this Helen Trinca – the biographer of that most Mozartian of Australian expats, Madeleine St John – narrates with effortless clarity and élan. She makes Harrower's crowded, sometimes confusing life seem crystal clear. There is the rivalry with (and affection for) Shirley Hazzard; the friendship with figures ranging from Judah Waten to Christina Stead; and the constant murmur from White that she could write a wonderful book. It's interesting, too, that the actor Ben Whishaw loves The Watchtower and describes Harrower's work as 'incredibly moving'.
It is certainly a big proposition to engage with. The Watchtower is an exercise in starkly expressionist prose which strains credulity with its portrait of the factory owner, who comes across to many readers as inhuman with his insanely casual proposal of marriage to one of the two sisters at the heart of the novel. The way they cope in this bizarre world of caricatures also confounds reality.
Less fantastical, however, is The Long Prospect, the 1958 novel which Christina Stead liked. 'You have a remarkable sober acerbity… you are unique,' she told Harrower. The author of The Man Who Loved Children, with its weird masculine dialects, its intense evocation of girlhood and its foreshadowed aftermath, had every reason to see a parallel voice in The Long Prospect. It is the story of a 12-year-old girl, long-legged and super-bright, who forms an intense friendship with a chaste, empathic man of culture who plies her with Darwin and Plato and everything in between. They come to love each other, which prompts the girl's grand-mother, a baleful, self-centred woman, to imply abuse. This strange, challenging book has a somewhat wild structure; but the central flame keeps burning in a way that is moving for all its bravado. Clearly the Harrower of The Long Prospect could do anything. David Malouf defends her right to her own dissatisfaction with In Certain Circles, though it's clear that the paired couples and the cooler, sparkling dialogue was a technical advance.
Trinca describes Harrower's delight at the late appreciation of her work, so skilfully effected by Michael Heyward of Text and the literary agent Jane Novak. This is a masterful biography by a writer who pulls no punches.