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Such courtesy was, for Shirley, of a piece with local respect for the arts. She recalled sending, in 1973, a congratulatory telegram from the Capri post office to Patrick White on hearing of his Nobel Prize: “The cable boys (far from the imposing stern professional ethics of indifference to message…

On Capri, Shirley grieved for her mother’s life as much as for her death: “One of her tragedies—as I do believe she had tragedy—was the inability to believe that other people appreciated her best qualities and had goodwill towards her; that she did not need to keep testing affection till it collaps…

The critic Don Anderson dismissed the lectures as “a speech-day address by the headmistress of a girls’ private school, of, dare I say, Queenwood” (Shirley’s old school) and criticised her “apparent ignorance of contemporary Australian thought and letters” and of “current social and political event…

Maxwell had been contacting members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, seeking nominations for Shirley for the Harold Vursell Award, given each year for recently published prose notable for the quality of its style. She did not win (the award went that year to Tom Wolfe), but her nominati…

The poet John Malcolm Brinnin wrote that on finishing the novel, he had immediately picked it up again and reread it: “The didactic side of me wants to treat it in the way art historians take paintings and reduce them to geometry, just to show that, behind all the shapes and colours there is that r…