In Certain Circles

by Elizabeth Harrower

Overview

Winner, Voss Literary Prize, 2015.

In Certain Circles is the long-lost final novel by the internationally acclaimed author of The Watch Tower.

Zoe Howard is seventeen when her brother, Russell, introduces her to Stephen Quayle. Aloof and harsh, Stephen is unlike anyone she has ever met, a weird, irascible character out of some dense Russian novel. His sister, Anna, is shy and thoughtful, a little orphan.

Zoe and Russell, Stephen and Anna: they may come from different social worlds but all four will spend their lives moving in and out of each other's shadow.

Set amid the lush gardens and grand stone houses that line the north side of Sydney Harbour, In Certain Circles is an intense psychological drama about family and love, tyranny and freedom.

Elizabeth Harrower was born in Sydney in 1928. Her first novel, Down in the City, was published in 1957, followed by The Long Prospect a year later. In 1960 she published The Catherine Wheel, the story of an Australian law student in London. The Watch Tower appeared in 1966. She is without doubt among the most important writers of the postwar period in Australia.

'In Certain Circles [is] a pin-sharp psychological drama about two pairs of siblings, set on the shores of Sydney Harbour. Harrower's searing, spare prose is breathtaking, as is her depiction of dashed promise and the gulf between the sexes.' Di Speirs, BBC Radio Books Editor

'Harrower was right about In Certain Circles being well written, but surely wrong to take its superb style for granted, as if mere literary muscle memory. Like the rest of her work, the novel is severely achieved: the coolly exact prose cannot be distinguished from the ashen exhaustion of its tragic fires...The book belongs with her best work, with The Watch Tower and The Long Prospect...[It] is more explicit than Harrower's earlier work about ideological tensions between men and women. It is also broader in scope and not as angry - wiser and less hopeless.' James Wood, New Yorker

'Harrower can pierce your heart.' Michael Dirda, Washington Post

'Harrower evokes the waste and futility of a decadent class with all the bite and poignancy of F Scott Fitzgerald.' Eimear McBride, New Statesman

'A scandalously overlooked writer.' Michelle de Kretser

'She is brilliant on power, isolation and class.' Ramona Koval, Australian

'In Certain Circles is subtle yet wounding, and very much alive.' Guardian Australia

'Reading In Certain Circles gave me the thrill that only comes from the work of a major novelist.' The Conversation

'Harrower's sparse prose is best read with careful concentration; it's easy to miss a brilliant observation or an original turn of phrase... An Australian novelist of extraordinary talent.' Readings

'Her insights into the nature of love, the role of women and the torsions of power in even the most ordinary relationship are bitter and sometimes cruel, wielded in the way that acute honesty may be, like a whip. Yet they are always delivered via the honeyed dipper of her prose.' Geordie Williamson, Monthly

'A coup...weirdly thrilling line by line...[its] dense and adult conversation crackles with a sense of moral urgency.' Delia Falconer, Australian

‘Masterful writing…this is a book that demands reading on its own terms, for its unflinching prose and the surgical precision with which it dissects these intertwined lives encircled by their differences.’ Newtown Review of Books

‘Harrower’s lost novel seems like a revelation, an insight into an Australian writer who is world-class and it is thrilling to discover her.’ M/C Reviews

‘Her portrait of two north shore Sydney families stands without stoop or shrug in a tradition of genius that includes Jane Austen, Henry James and Shirley Hazard…I felt like I was looking, really looking at life, in a way that Iris Murdoch might call moral.’ Sydney Morning Herald 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781925095272
Publisher:	The Text Publishing Company
Publication date:	04/23/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	850 KB

About the Author

Elizabeth Harrower was born in Sydney in 1928. She lived in Newcastle until her family moved back to Sydney when she was eleven.

In 1951 Harrower travelled to London and began to write. Her first novel, Down in the City, was published there in 1957 and was followed by The Long Prospect a year later. In 1959 she returned to Sydney, where she worked in radio and then in publishing. Her third novel, The Catherine Wheel, appeared in 1960.

Harrower published The Watch Tower in 1966. Four years later she finished a new novel, In Certain Circles, but withdrew it from publication at the last moment, in 1971. It remained unpublished until 2014. In Certain Circles is Harrower's final completed novel, though in the 1970s and 1980s she continued to write short fiction. She is one of Australia's most important postwar writers. She was admired by many of her contemporaries, including Patrick White and Christina Stead, who both became lifelong friends. Her novels are now being acclaimed by a new generation of readers.

Harrower lives in Sydney.

Editorial Reviews

‘Magnificently sad and funny...the best skewering of life between the sexes since Mary McCarthy’s “The Group.’—Boston Globe ('Best Books of 2015')

‘Harrower’s prose is watchful, witty, unillusioned, exultant. Its healthful vitality – vivid, accurate, alive to irony – is a dashing stand against its subject matter: human perversity, so often squalid, senseless, swallowing all meaning. The reader marvels at its balance, its sinuousness, as each fresh wave hits….There is a note of elegy in all of Harrower’s work, even as the adrenaline flows, and a lyricism reminiscent of F.Scott Fitzgerald at his desperate best.’—Times Literary Supplement

‘In Certain Circles is subtle yet wounding, and very much alive.’—Guardian

‘Harrower can pierce your heart.’—Michael Dirda, Washington Post

‘With its flavor of Henry James, Harrower’s rediscovered story is an odd, brittle yet impressive piece of work that exposes the complex passions beneath a drawing-room-scenario surface.’—Kirkus Reviews

‘A stark, uncompromising drama of marital imprisonment and psychological manipulation. In its atmosphere of dread and compulsion it has elements of Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic suspense novels. But Ms. Harrower’s fearsome objectivity and her bristling, beautiful prose come from modernist masters like Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen.’ Wall St Journal

‘Harrower was right about In Certain Circles being well written, but surely wrong to take its superb style for granted, as if mere literary muscle memory. Like the rest of her work, the novel is severely achieved: the coolly exact prose cannot be distinguished from the ashen exhaustion of its tragic fires…The book belongs with her best work, with The Watch Tower and The Long Prospect…[It] is more explicit than Harrower’s earlier work about ideological tensions between men and women. It is also broader in scope and not as angry—wiser and less hopeless.’ James Wood, New Yorker

‘Harrower evokes the waste and futility of a decadent class with all the bite and poignancy of F Scott Fitzgerald.’ Eimear McBride, New Statesman

‘In Certain Circles [is] a pin-sharp psychological drama about two pairs of siblings, set on the shores of Sydney Harbour. Harrower’s searing, spare prose is breathtaking, as is her depiction of dashed promise and the gulf between the sexes.’ Di Speirs, BBC Radio Books Editor

‘For me, the great discovery of 2014 was the work of Elizabeth Harrower.’ Favourite Books of 2014, New Yorker

‘Elizabeth Harrower’s unpublished In Certain Circles finally gets its moment in the sun, and it’s been well worth the wait.’ Australian Financial Review

‘A coup…weirdly thrilling line by line…[its] dense and adult conversation crackles with a sense of moral urgency.’ Australian

‘Her insights into the nature of love, the role of women and the torsions of power in even the most ordinary relationship are bitter and sometimes cruel, wielded in the way that acute honesty may be, like a whip. Yet they are always delivered via the honeyed dipper of her prose.’ The Monthly

‘A novel of astonishing psychological insight exploring the darker aspects of human attraction.’ Saturday Paper

‘Reading In Certain Circles gave me the thrill that only comes from the work of a major novelist.’ The Conversation

‘A brilliant exploration of relationships, marriage, thwarted passion and the beauty and the price of love.’ Herald Sun

‘There are many wonderful things in this novel. Harrower’s skill in evoking a place is impressive. Her eye for oddities of behaviour, for quirks of character and for patches of pretentiousness is as sure as ever. The wry intelligence of her view of middle-class Australian life is evident throughout. Her writing is characteristically sharp and pithy. Whatever the reason behind her decision not to allow this novel to be released four decades ago, its rebirth is an event to be celebrated.’ Sydney Morning Herald

From the Publisher

2014-08-25
A previously unpublished novel by an Australian author whose work from the 1950s and '60s has recently found new popularity reveals how a privileged daughter's bright future leads to misery. Harrower (The Watch Tower, 2013, etc.) published four novels more than half a century ago, then withdrew the fifth before its scheduled publication and stopped writing. Available now for the first time, the book returns readers to characteristic Harrower terrain via the finely scrutinized interior lives of two very different pairs of siblings divided by social status, assumptions and, above all, psychologies. Zoe and Russell Howard are the gilded children of notable, well-connected parents living in middle-class comfort in Sydney. A chance meeting on a train introduces Russell to Stephen Quayle and then his sister Anna, whose parents' deaths in a car accident left them under the damaging guardianship of an uncle and his disturbed wife. While Anna seems to have emerged relatively intact, Stephen is angry and judgmental, and beautiful, talented Zoe—"There was something enchanting and winning and touching about her, and she knew it"—is electrified by his difference. Years later, after Zoe has begun a promising career in the film industry in Europe, her mother dies, and returning to Australia, she is reunited with Stephen. Soon they are married, but the honeymoon phase, with Zoe trying to "cure" Stephen of his unhappy past, slowly evolves into something more destructive, as Stephen's mix of tenderness and abuse slowly eats away at her. Formal in tone and cerebral in style, Harrower's novel proceeds in a sequence of snapshot episodes dominated by semiabstract conversations. It takes a late kind of theatrical coup to push the actors out of their frozen roles into a reconfigured future. With its flavor of Henry James, Harrower's rediscovered story is an odd, brittle yet impressive piece of work that exposes the complex passions beneath a drawing-room-scenario surface.

Kirkus Reviews