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'Elizabeth Harrower, one of the most talented of our younger novelists, is a writer whose steadily developing work deserves fuller consideration than it has so far been given. Her books may lack the more obvious and insistent attractions that have won numerous readers for Randolph Stow, Thea Astley, and Thomas Keneally, but they are the products of a truly creative writer, subtie, disciplined, and perceptive. Her fiction does not lend itself to quick illustration and cursory discussion; its strength lies in her absorption in the relationships she traces between her characters. Her talents begin to manifest themselves only when we follow her as she works through the spectrum of a whole scene and then pause to consider its place in the general design. Unlike some of her contemporaries who have tasted success, she never hurries into print, and, allowing for differences of opinion about The Catherine Wheel, we are justified in claiming for her work as a whole a gradual expansion of imaginative power as she extends the range of her subjects and intensifies their treatment, and a steady progress in technical accomplishment as we move from one book to the next. Her four novels are spread over a period of ten years: Down in the City (1957), The Long Prospect (1958), The Catherine Wheel (1960) and The Watch Tower (1966). They are, without exception, short novels (interestingly enough, all almost exactly the same length, just over 200 pages each), but from The Long Prospect onwards they manage to pack a good deal into a short space. Before looking at each in some detail it will be as well to offer a few generalizations.' (Publication abstract)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Sex and the City : New Novels by Women and Middlebrow Culture at Mid-Century
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , October-November vol. 27 no. 3/4 2012; (p. 1-12) 'Central to developments in Australian literature during the period from the end of Second World War until the mid-1960s - what might be called the 'long 1950s' - was the emergence of the kind of modernist novel written by Patrick White as the benchmark of modern fiction. This was the outcome of a struggle among opinion-makers in the literary field, which during this period came to be dominated for the first time by academic critics. They, by and large, favoured the new forms of postwar modernism and rejected that literary nationalism which had drawn the loyalty of most influential writers during the 1930s and 940s.' (Author's introduction)
-
Sex and the City : New Novels by Women and Middlebrow Culture at Mid-Century
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , October-November vol. 27 no. 3/4 2012; (p. 1-12) 'Central to developments in Australian literature during the period from the end of Second World War until the mid-1960s - what might be called the 'long 1950s' - was the emergence of the kind of modernist novel written by Patrick White as the benchmark of modern fiction. This was the outcome of a struggle among opinion-makers in the literary field, which during this period came to be dominated for the first time by academic critics. They, by and large, favoured the new forms of postwar modernism and rejected that literary nationalism which had drawn the loyalty of most influential writers during the 1930s and 940s.' (Author's introduction)
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- Down in the City 1957 single work novel
- The Long Prospect 1958 single work novel
- The Catherine Wheel 1960 single work novel
- The Watch Tower 1966 single work novel
