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The Auden scholar Edward Mendelson described her as, above all, civilised: “There was a sense Shirley had, it was not courtesy, it was a sense of your value as a human being. It wasn’t a demand, it was that she assumed good motives on your part, civilised motives.” The intimacy of her conversation …

The Auden scholar Edward Mendelson described her as, above all, civilised: “There was a sense Shirley had, it was not courtesy, it was a sense of your value as a human being. It wasn’t a demand, it was that she assumed good motives on your part, civilised motives.” The intimacy of her conversation …

Aligned with that project of feeling, observing, imagining—the novelist’s work—is the human and poetic matter of love. She explained that she had wanted to write “a story of falling in love,” to tell truthfully “the accidental meeting of man and woman and a sense of destined engagement that would p…

A couple of weeks before the National Book Award ceremonies, Shirley Hazzard gave a reading at the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street YMHA. She was introduced by the poet J. D. McClatchy, who spoke of “a special shrine to Shirley Hazzard” beside which he had “moped” for the past twenty year…

If Shirley Hazzard had indeed prepared a “putative remark,” as flagged in her diary, she must have decided to set it aside. Instead, she addressed Stephen King’s words directly: “I don’t think giving us a reading list of those who are most read at this moment is much of a satisfaction,” she said. “…