Cirrus@Austlit

'The recent publication by Text of two new works by Elizabeth Harrower, along with their reissuing of all her earlier novels, some out of print for over fifty years, provides an ideal opportunity to study the development of various themes and preoccupations in her fiction. I have chosen here to focus on her fictional representations of Australia and Australians, and in particular how the city of Sydney, where she has spent most of her life, figures in her work. The previous difficulty of accessing Harrower’s novels has, no doubt, been one of the reasons why they have received little detailed critical study. Most essays published to date have discussed The Watch Tower (1966), using a variety of perspectives but rarely mentioning its Sydney setting. In 1990, when editor of Southerly, I published an essay on Down in the City (1957) by Rosie Yeo, based on her Honours thesis which I had supervised, to draw attention to this then largely forgotten novel. While the differences in class and attitude of those who live in various parts of Sydney are especially important in this novel, the city appears in all of Harrower’s works, even those not primarily set there.' (Introduction)