Through 2000, it was clear to their friends that Emmy and Bill Maxwell were both increasingly frail and, by the summer, that Emmy was close to death. Bill was reading War and Peace to her, and then to himself. Shirley later wrote that his “solace and pleasure in the book were an event in those rooms.” When Bill grew too weak to hold the book, Annabel came each afternoon and read for him. Throughout these days Shirley also came often and, if the Maxwells weren’t well enough to see her, sat in the living room. These long daily visits were important. Alec Wilkinson, who was also there each day, felt that “Shirley and Bill connected on some level that was beyond social. Shirley was there in a profound way, the way one person would be there for another, to ease the burden, drawing on all the capital of the years of friendship and regard … There was something fierce about it … She was seeing their friendship, their love, to the end. Attending it. The attention of love. It was in character of what she would do. It was duty in the best sense.”

She mused in her diary on the alignment of passion and morality shadowed by her own sense of fated misalignment—the coming-round of things and the too-late that are so completely expressed in The Transit of Venus—in her new novel. And she reflected on the timing of her own coming to love: “Reading these excruciating letters, our tragic story, I realise that one—and at any rate I—needed half a lifetime to prepare to deserve—or to be a person who might deserve—love; to subdue self and to comfort, nurture, inspire perhaps and share the life of such a man. We need what we can’t have: the rehearsal for the rightful life. With … Francis it came right, as right as ever such a life can be. The strangeness of this dichotomy, the re-living of a great love.” The coming “right” of her life with Francis now seemed to provide the “happy ending” of her past story with Alec, a happy ending that she sought to write into the book.

[...] Helen Garner, who offered a compelling account of the kind of shift that might take place in the mysterious spaces of reading, taste, and perception. Garner recalled her own early hostility to Hazzard’s novels, “back in the 80s”:

Everyone I knew was swept away by them. I tried to read them but they bored me. They made me feel cranky, bolshie and obscurely ashamed. I couldn’t hack her elegant women with their fancy, made-up names, women who were soignées, who had their hair done and wore heels and sheer stockings, who trailed their long fingers in fountains and let their bracelets jingle against the marble basin. They (and their creator) shuddered, I knew, at oafish Australians like me, and at the coarse world I came from and was content to live in. I was viscerally insulted by the way she drew her skirts aside from the daggy, rough-grained Australia that I knew I belonged in, the country outside which I already sensed I would never be able to flourish. I don’t think I spoke about these thoughts to anyone. I just thought them, resentfully and, though I didn’t admit it to myself, sadly.

When Garner returned, decades later, to Hazzard’s work, she found her view transformed. She recognised qualities she had, she felt, been “unable to appreciate at the time: the way she handles a sentence, her wit and subtlety, her deep knowledge of the world … the fine sensibility, the adult sensibility that I was not ready for…” This emphatically and thoughtfully “Australian” reading upends the sense that Hazzard’s writing is outdated, or out of place in Australia, suggesting as it does that such simple coordinates might not necessarily determine either a reader or a writer.