In 1966 Elizabeth Harrower was on the brink of literary fame. Critics hailed her fourth book, The Watch Tower, as one of the year’s most important Australian novels, alongside The Solid Mandala by her friend Patrick White. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Harry Kippax wrote that “one can be grateful to have had in twelve months two such additions to the small body of distinguished Australian novels”. An ABC reviewer said Harrower’s “brilliant” book was “one of the best Australian novels I have read for a long while”.
Seven years later White won the Nobel prize for literature. By then Harrower had written another novel but withdrawn it from her English publisher, disappointed by his reaction. After some false starts she stopped writing and all but disappeared for the next 40 years – before being rediscovered, unexpectedly, when she was in her 80s.
So it won’t be surprising if you haven’t heard of Harrower. But as her biographer I’m here to recommend her timeless, quietly devastating studies of emotional tyranny: Down in the City (1957), The Long Prospect (1958), The Catherine Wheel (1960), The Watch Tower (1966) and In Certain Circles (2014).
Harrower was born in 1928 in Newcastle, north of Sydney, a lonely child of divorced parents and grandparents. She escaped her unhappy youth in the 1950s by moving to London, where she wasted nothing of what she had suffered and seen.
She lived poor and wrote furiously to produce the first three novels, all intense psychological dramas that drew on her family life, her sharp observation of society and her experiences in cold-war, class-ridden England. Although she refused to be labelled a feminist, she was writing about the need for women’s liberation before the term was coined.
I had not read her books until they were reissued by her local publisher, Text, in 2012-14, followed by In Certain Circles, the novel whose publication she had stopped in 1971. There was a lightning flash of the fame she should have had back then. James Wood, the New Yorker critic, discovered her and wrote, in an admiring five-page review, of “her wounded wisdom, the elegance and strictness and perilous poise of her sentences, the humane understanding, and ceaseless incisions, of her intelligence”.
Wood couldn’t understand why Harrower had hidden In Certain Circles away with her papers in the National Library of Australia. Neither could Harrower herself, when I interviewed her in 2014. She hadn’t reread the novel about relationships among two sets of siblings divided by class and personality in harbourside Sydney. Significantly, she hadn’t thrown it away either, believing it was well written if imperfect, and might be found after her death.
“I suppose I have been very good at closing doors and ending things,” she said. “But the other mystery is why I was so angry, annoyed or self-destructive as to make up my mind that I would spare the world any more of my great thoughts.”
More questions than answers emerged from the interviews and friendly conversations we had in the years before her death in 2020.
I spent the next five years piecing together the intriguing story of this private woman: how she became a writer, where her fiction came from, and why she went silent; and why she remained single, devoting herself to friends including White, Kylie Tennant, Christina Stead and Shirley Hazzard’s demanding mother (while Hazzard devoted herself to writing in New York and Capri).
There were surprises about Harrower’s unstable family, including her beloved mother and hated alcoholic stepfather, models for the characters in her stories of domestic despots and their victims. I found out how hard she had worked at crafting and selling her writing, in an era when most Australian books were published in the UK and exported to Australia, providing little income for their authors.
Harrower’s loss of confidence began with not winning the Miles Franklin literary award for The Watch Tower, for which White had recommended her. Instead the prize went to English-born Peter Mathers for his fashionably experimental novel Trap, which a journalist described a year later as “a highly praised worst-seller”.
White badgered Harrower to carry on, warned her not to let other people devour her time and inscribed one of his books, “Love Patrick. WHY WON’T YOU WRITE?” Friends helped her win writer’s grants but the pressure was counterproductive.
The sudden death of her mother, in 1970, gave her material for some short stories, as well as an emotional breakdown and an inheritance. She talked for years of her need to write but she had used up her urgent material.
Harrower’s tale is, in a way, the story of all writers. In other ways her life is as astonishing as her fiction. She resisted conventional expectations of marriage and motherhood; she escaped brutal alcoholic men in her family, and had lovers who didn’t measure up. She became a writer by reading, survived by working in offices, absorbed the politics of social justice and had X-ray vision into the hearts of ordinary humans. Her vibrant social and political life gradually overtook her writing. And why not?
As new generations of writers emerged, Harrower might have been forgotten except for the publishers, scholars and readers who championed her novels and short stories, knowing they transcended fashion. They remain in print, demonstrating that society changes but the best and worst of human nature stay the same.
Elizabeth Harrower: The Woman in the Watch Tower by Susan Wyndham is out through NewSouth Books ($39.99)
