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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…

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…