AustLit

'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)