Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

by
August 1980, no. 23

The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

Macmillan, 337 pp, $19.95, 0 333 27751 1

The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

by
August 1980, no. 23

The Transit of Venus has been widely acclaimed, and justly so: it is a great novel of passion and ambition, success and failure, written with elegance and wit, and magnificently structured. Still, despite the critical superlatives, few critics have attempted to come to grips with the power of Hazzard’s writing. There have been the inevitable comparisons with Jane Austen, and some attention has been paid to the symbolic connotations of the title, but little more. The prose and structure of the novel are worth examining in some detail because, seven years in the making, it is a most crafted and sculpted work of literary art.


Subscribe to ABR


Rosemary Creswell reviews 'The Transit of Venus' by Shirley Hazzard

The Transit of Venus

by Shirley Hazzard

Macmillan, 337 pp, $19.95, 0 333 27751 1

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.