Cirrus@Austlit

'This collection of letters between the two grandes dames of Australian letters, Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower, shows how the writing life is often a struggle between freedom and the hard choices writers make to sustain that freedom. Despite growing up in the same Sydney suburb, Hazzard and Harrower never did meet in Sydney. Although there were meetings later, in Europe, this was a friendship that was grounded in  care, and particularly in the care of the difficult and elderly in Hazzard’s mother, Kit, and Harrower’s friend, the novelist Patrick White.' (Introduction)