Cirrus@Austlit

Elizabeth Harrower was born in Sydney and grew up at Newcastle. Harrower spent most of the 1950s living in London where she wrote her first novels, only one of which (The Catherine Wheel) is set in London. Returning to Australia, she worked for the ABC, as a reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald and for a publishing firm.

Harrower's novels are admired for their focus on the psychological oppression and liberation of female protagonists, a focus missing from Australian novels of the 1950s and 1960s. Harrower's best-known novel is The Watch Tower (1966), a tale of a woman's attempted escape from a dull life by marriage to her employer who eventually resorts to psychological cruelty and physical violence, forcing her to escape once more from an unhappy relationship.

Although she wrote occasional reviews and short stories, The Watch Tower was Harrower's last novel, until she released In Certain Circles in 2014. Text Publishing, which also published the new novel, had been re-releasing Harrower's earlier works, and the combination of the novels coming back into print and the new novel resulted in a new wave of interest in Harrower's writing. Since 2014, her works have increasingly been translated, especially into French. She also released a volume of her short stories, A Few Days in the Country, in 2015.

The reputation of her novels had remained strong throughout her hiatus. In 1996, she received the Patrick Award for the contribution her novels have made to Australian literature. In Certain Circles  won the 2015 Voss Prize, and was shortlisted for numerous other awards, including the Prime minister's Literary Awards, while A Few Days in the Country won the Steele Rudd Award (Queensland Literary Awards) and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. Her novels have been taught at universities across Australia.

Elizabeth Harrower died in 2020, aged 92.