Elizabeth Harrower:
The re-awakening of a post-war literary giant
Essay by Rebecca Lim
Harrower’s fifth novel, In Certain Circles
(withdrawn from publication in 1971, but finally
published in 2014), was the impetus for Harrower
now experiencing a “fairytale” moment of rediscovery.
Until independent publisher Text Publishing reissued Harrower’s The Watch Tower in 2012 (also reissuing or publishing the remainder of her novels and
a collection of short stories in rapid succession), many
of Harrower’s own acquaintances had no idea she was
a writer of the magnitude of White himself.
Harrower is an acute and discomfort-producing
portraitist as her publisher, Michael Heyward has put
it, of:
class, gender and power. She applies a spotlight to those things in a way I don’t think
any other writer really does, with this intense,
unsentimental and relentless psychological
examination of men and women interacting
with each other.
You would be fairly excused if you’d
never heard of, nor read a word by, post-war
Australian literary author Elizabeth Harrower.
Now eighty-seven, and having abandoned writing
for almost four decades, Harrower’s first four full
length novels Down in the City (1957)
The Long Prospect (1958)
The Catherine Wheel (1960) and
The Watch Tower (1966)
- all fell out of print by the early 1990s, despite
Harrower being a contemporary and close friend of
writers such as Patrick White and Christina Stead,
who declared The Long Prospect to have “no equal
in our writing.” And despite Harrower herself
declaring that writing is “what I can do, it’s all I can
do.”