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 events.” In this last point he was mostly correct, although her correspondence with Elizabeth Harrower reveals a sustained and detailed discussion of Australian political and cultural affairs, and her 1977 New Yorker essay about Australia is detailed and informed about the contemporary Australian scene. Beyond this, critics of her lectures also disregarded her belief that writers must challenge and criticise nationalistic assertions. These were matters already encountered in her battles with Murray Bail and others. In the moment, it was the ferocity of Anderson’s comments, and their implicit misogyny, that hurt most. It is worth noting that this was not an isolated instance. In 1980, amid the glowing international reception and extraordinary success of The Transit of Venus, another Australian critic, Peter Pierce, had dismissed the novel as “the best-dressed women’s magazine fiction of its year.” Two decades later, another Australian critic, John Docker, wrote of Greene on Capri: “The book claws at its reader, calling admire me, admire me. Get away, I thought. I responded to the book’s preciousness by (as it were) manhandling it; I underlined, wrote in the margins and notated ‘fuck’ next to particularly studied phrases (like ‘cold evenings of Rilkean stars’).”