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On its publication in the spring of 1980, reviews, laudatory, were also personal, even intimate; readers were drawn fast into the novel, experiencing shocks and revelations along with the characters. In The New York Times, John Leonard wrote that Transit’s “business is to break the heart” and confe…

There is something untimely about this novel, above all stylistically. In 2010, Michael Gorra wrote that it “would have seemed old-fashioned in 1980,” when it was published, a view echoed by other readers who, in the decades that followed its publication, seem often to have been delaying, holding o…

There is also Transit’s untimely relation to feminism. The second wave that was exploding all around through the years of its writing is barely evident in its pages, despite its interest in women’s lives. Shirley was not, then or ever, drawn to feminism; her concern with women’s authority and agenc…

All this was distraction; her real work continued, slowly, behind the scenes. In May 1979 the New York Times poetry editor Thomas Lask reported in his column that “a major novel by Shirley Hazzard … longer and more complex than anything this writer has done previously” would be published the follow…

Throughout the novel, time is upended, complicated, its passage thwarted—the past is never past. At one point Sophie remembers a failed love affair, remembers listening to the man’s “complicated exposition of the reasons why he could not love her in return,” and she is “glad now to be reminded of t…