Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) was an Australian American writer who traveled extensively with her diplomat father in her youth before settling in New York City to work for the United Nations. She was a typist for the United Nations Secretariat for 10 years before her short story "Woollahra Road" was accepted by the New Yorker and she quit to write full time. Hazzard released her first novel, The Evening of the Holiday, in 1966, followed by The Bay of Noon in 1970. Her breakthrough work, The Transit of Venus, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1980. Hazzard's final novel, The Great Fire (2003), received the National Book Award for Fiction. She also wrote two scathing nonfiction books about her experiences at the United Nations: Defeat of an Ideal (1973) and Countenance of Truth (1990).
The Transit of Venus follows orphaned Australian sisters Caroline and Grace Bell as they build new lives in postwar England. Grace marries a wealthy bureaucrat. Caroline pines for an unscrupulous married man, pursued meanwhile by her own shabby suitor. Hazzard tracks these divergent lives over decades, to where the ramifications of youthful decisions can only be understood with age. Penguin Classics recently republished The Transit of Venus with a new introduction by novelist Lauren Groff. --Tobias Mutter
