Maraú Península: Shirley Hazzard’s “Something You’ll Remember Always”

Wednesday, March 24

Shirley Hazzard’s “Something You’ll Remember Always”

From The New Yorker's archive: a portion of her novel "The Transit of Venus," published in the magazine as a short story in 1979.

View in browser | Update your preferences

Hydrangeas grown up the side of a stone house

Fiction

"Something You'll Remember Always"

After their parents are drowned in a capsized ferry, two sisters in Australia move with their half sister, Dora, to a house by the sea.

By Shirley Hazzard

In an interview in 2005, the novelist Shirley Hazzard recalled her teen-age imagination as "hungry and adventurous," a description that applies equally to her own remarkable body of work. A native of Australia, Hazzard published her first short story in The New Yorker at the age of thirty, after the fiction editor, William Maxwell, pulled it from the slush pile; she would go on to write more than thirty pieces for the magazine between 1961 and 1990. In addition to fiction, Hazzard reported on a variety of subjects, including the consequences of racist government policies against the Aborigines in Australia; an international conference on ancient writings and papyrology; and the complicated history of the United Nations. She also published nine books, including "The Bay of Noon" and "The Great Fire," which won the National Book Award for Fiction, in 2003. In 1980, Hazzard published her masterpiece, "The Transit of Venus," about two orphaned sisters who leave Australia to start a new life in postwar England. It's one of my favorite novels, and Hazzard's expressive, often keening prose has a way of lingering long after the first perusal. What many readers may not know is that several portions of the book appeared in The New Yorker, including as the short story "Something You'll Remember Always," published in 1979. As the story commences, the two young sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, are still in Australia, where they have just received news that their parents have drowned; they subsequently go to live with their half sister Dora, in Sydney. Life with Dora is chaotic, and the girls bristle at her constant attempts to control them. "Refinement was maintained on the razor's edge of an abyss. To appear without gloves or in other ways to suggest the flesh, to so much as show unguarded love, was to be pitchforked into brutish, bottomless Australia, all the way back to primitive man," Hazzard writes. "Refinement was a frail construction continually dashed by waves of a raw, reminding humanity." As Caroline and Grace react to the strictures of their new life, Hazzard expertly sketches the parallels between the girls' reluctant suppression of their own nature and the intricate rules of class that now surround them. Part of the brilliance of Hazzard's story, and her subsequent novel, is the way in which she weaves together the intimate and the panoramic, allowing us to see the shifting political landscape in Australia reflected in the minutiae of her characters' lives. As the story progresses, it becomes a tale about the delicate resilience of adolescence, set against the harsh backdrop of a postwar nation. Hazzard elegantly navigates the story's multilayered narrative forays into Australia's past, and, in doing so, delivers something palpably real—or, as she might put it, "something memorable, true as literature."

—Erin Overbey, archive editor