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 following spring. Prepublication marketing affirmed the event and the achievement: “Shirley Hazzard’s first novel in many years is already being hailed as a literary masterpiece.” With publication came reports of the extraordinary labour of the novel’s construction—that it had taken a decade to write, with “as many as 20–30 drafts per page”—feeding into the sense of its consequence. The Transit of Venus is undeniably a masterpiece, one of the great novels of the century. Its complex, densely wrought plot traces the lives of two Australian sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, across the globe, through lives, marriages, and love affairs. The sisters take up with public figures—writer, scientist, doctor, bureaucrat, activist—while around them unfold the dramas of the globalising postwar world: “In America, a white man had been shot dead in a car, and a black man on a veranda. In Russia, a novelist had emerged from hell to announce that beauty would save the world. Russian tanks rolled through Prague while America made war in Asia. In Greece the plays of Aristophanes were forbidden, in China the writings of Confucius.” There is an insistence on the weight and substance of human words and lives, a sense of expectation and portentousness that comes straight from melodrama. The novel begins with the arrival of a marked figure, a stranger, at “the farthest and largest house” in the middle of a storm wreaking devastation at once ordinary and mythic: “Housewives were rushing, and crying out, ‘My washing.’ And a sudden stripe of light split earth from sky.” The action, largely visual, sweeps from the elemental world of vale, hill, castle, and deluge to a richly domestic interior, a circular hallway, a bowl of roses, a newspaper, “a dark picture framed in gold.” A little later, the melodrama is made explicit: “A little curled chrysanthemum of a dog was in heaven at her approach. ‘Grasper. Grasper.’ The dog jumped up and down, speechless. Someone was shaking a bell. Grace was opening a door. And the lights went up by themselves as on a stage.”