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.”

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 off, even resisting its appeal. Geoff Dyer wrote that he had finally turned to read Transit twenty years after buying a copy and was struck then by the sense that he was reading it “at the perfect moment,” that he had been in fact “destined to read the book at this moment,” his experience chiming with the novel’s deep investment in destiny. David Miller, a few years later, wrote of his irritation at how long it had taken him to read the novel and that having begun, “I was ensnared, like having been bitten by a puppy or kitten that wouldn’t let go until it tasted blood.” Another decade on, Michelle de Kretser remembered that in 1980 she had wondered, “Why the fuss?” She had read the novel and “forgot about it for twenty years”; then, opening it again, “the sensation came, like a blow to the breastbone,” from the first page, “the shock of the great.”

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 agency in the world was expressed through other modes. The philosopher Akeel Bilgrami, a friend of her later years, describes Transit’s Caro Bell as “one of the great women characters of the modern novel—someone we recognize for a kind of strength at a time when feminism was not in the air, and so women possessed of such strength had no peg of doctrine to hang it on.” Bilgrami proposes that Caro’s situation is particularly poignant because, unlike her great antecedents—Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Dorothea Brooke—she “lives and loves in the decade just before the turn to feminism, and so all the reader’s urges on her behalf are of the sort we feel when we think of a ‘close miss’; and yet Shirley is confident in her resolve that these qualities of character and temperament in Caro might well be the more interesting for having missed.” There is in this view a richness in the combination of feminism’s proximity and its absence.

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 confessed that “although I suppose that such emotions are inappropriate to criticism, I finished the book angry and in tears.” The affect was itself a function of the writing: “No matter the object—a feeling, a face, a room, the weather—it is stripped of its layers of paint, its clots of words, down to the original wood; oil is applied; grain appears, and a glow. Every epigram and apostrophe is earned. A powerful intelligence is playing with a knife. It is an intelligence that refuses to be deflected by ironies; irony isn’t good enough.” The allusive prose that had beguiled readers of the early novels was now fully formed, strikingly not of its time, but drawing, somehow, on the long traditions of literature. Anthony Hecht spelled this out in his formal introduction to her in a 1983 Library of Congress series of public talks on poetry. Shirley Hazzard was, he said,

A writer of fiction in a series of programs usually devoted to poets. But by dint of the craft of her work, the lyric movement, the voluminous literary resonance of her beautiful and meticulous prose, she very evidently elects to keep such company. For she brings to her writing that wealth of literary tradition that poets have always conceived to be their special heritage, but which only a very few novelists have tried to make use of … What distinguishes her writing above all is that she takes her words seriously, as very few novelists do these days. Her words recur within her text like lyric refrains, each repetition bearing a new increment of meaning. Yeats could do that sort of thing, and Shakespeare, and Joyce. It is more than mere technique; it is knowing the reach and dimension, the metric weight of each simple, innocent word, and using that knowledge to advantage.

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 reticulum of ideas, that controlling hand,” adding that he was “in a sort of enchanted jeopardy: I swear you write just for me.”

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 nomination was endorsed by Bernard Malamud and Arthur Miller. Miller wrote Maxwell, “I am in the middle of ‘Venus’ and have not been so enthralled by a book in many years […] I think she merits everything anybody can give her.”