Issue Details: First known date: 2017... 2017 A Really Long Prospect : Elizabeth Harrower's Fallen World
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'When I first read The Long Prospect (1958) some thirty years ago, what impressed me was the expressivity of Harrower’s writing, its power in capturing the drama and surge of emotion. It strikes you immediately, in the first pages of the novel, which have the formidable and oppressive grandmother Lilian intruding into the flat of her one-time boarder, the young scientist Thea, with “her eyes on swivels” – and not just her eyes working overtime, but her eyebrows too, “one ironic eyebrow cocked and ready to greet Thea”, and “one drooping disdainfully”. 1 As so often in Harrower, the drama of emotion is played out in the face – the characters constantly scan each other’s faces, they twist incredulously or curve maliciously, they beam with admiration or are bleached with dismay. Their mouths are similarly expressive – close-lipped with resolution, quivering with anger, clamped shut with rage. They exhibit several different kinds of laughter, smiles, grins and giggles – most of them fairly chilling. And then of course the eyes – cold, downcast, brightly sullen, wild with accusation or fixed with tension, “frank and yet guarded” (125). Within moments of her intrusion into the younger woman’s flat, Lilian’s face and indeed the nervous, endlessly mobile dispositions of her body in the confined space, have registered a whole parade of emotions: disdain, resentment, disapproval, wonder, disappointment, incredulity, anger, excitement, annoyance, jealousy, awe and derision.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Elizabeth Harrower : Critical Essays Elizabeth McMahon (editor), Brigitta Olubas (editor), Sydney : Sydney University Press , 2017 12996118 2017 anthology criticism

    'In 2014, four decades after it was written, Elizabeth Harrower's novel In Certain Circles was published to much anticipation. In 1971, it had been withdrawn by the author shortly before its planned publication. The novel's rediscovery sparked a revival of international interest in Harrower's work, with the republication of her previous novels and, in 2015, the appearance of her first new work in nearly four decades.

    'Elizabeth Harrower: Critical Essays is the first collection of critical writing on Harrower's fiction. It includes eloquent tributes by two acclaimed contemporary novelists, Michelle de Kretser and Fiona McFarlane, and essays by leading critics of Australian literature. They consider Harrower's treatment of time and place; her depiction of women, men, and their interactions in the mid twentieth century; her engagement with world history; and her nimble, complex, profoundly modern approach to plot, character and genre. Together they offer new insights into a writer at the crossroads of modernism and postmodernism, and invite readers to read and re-read Harrower's work in a new light.' (Publication summary) 

    Sydney : Sydney University Press , 2017
    pg. 21-27
Last amended 23 Jul 2020 13:13:52
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