Books

Helen Trinca
Looking for Elizabeth: The Life of Elizabeth Harrower

Why did Elizabeth Harrower stop writing at the height of her powers? This mystery is at the centre of Helen Trinca’s latest biography, Looking for Elizabeth: The Life of Elizabeth Harrower. It is an intriguing, almost irresistible question that perplexed Harrower’s close friends and fellow novelists Christina Stead, Shirley Hazzard and Patrick White.

Born in Newcastle in 1928, Harrower published four novels at a steady rate: Down in the City (1957), The Long Prospect (1958), The Catherine Wheel (1960) and The Watch Tower (1966). Her literary prowess was recognised with a Miles Franklin longlisting in 1958 and a shortlisting in 1967. Considered a writer’s writer, Harrower’s prose has been described by critics as “haunting and delicate”, “utterly hypnotic”, “lyrical, insightful and finely tuned”.

Except for a few short stories published in the 1970s, Harrower seemingly stopped writing in her 40s. By the early 1990s, all her novels were out of print and Harrower slowly slipped into obscurity.

In 2012, Text Publishing began to republish her novels. Harrower, then in her mid 80s, moved from the shadows to the spotlight. Harrower told publisher Michael Heyward she had a “lost manuscript” sitting in the National Library of Australia’s archives that she had finished writing in 1971. Released in 2014, Harrower’s fifth novel, In Certain Circles, received a cascade of award listings, from the Miles Franklin to the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction.

Trinca sets about investigating the story behind the “lost manuscript” by tracking back to the beginning of Harrower’s life. In clean, focused prose, Trinca untangles Harrower’s complex childhood. The task demanded that Trinca comb through public records, newspapers and countless court reports. “Warring parents and grandparents, two very public divorces, alcoholism, adultery, boarders and patients: it’s not surprising that in later life Elizabeth did not want to talk about her childhood,” writes Trinca.

Early in the biography there are several avenues of interest that Trinca appears to avoid, such as an offhand comment that “Elizabeth did a stint with an undertaker” while living in London during her 20s. But it becomes increasingly clear that the book’s title – Looking for Elizabeth – is pitch perfect. Harrower was masterful at being discreet.

In trying to “control the record of her life”, Harrower tore up hundreds of letters before her death in July 2020: “Many of her early diaries did not survive Elizabeth’s efforts to cull her past.” It is not as if Trinca had a lack of ephemera to sift through: Harrower maintained prolific and often decades-long correspondence with a wide sweep of people, including Hazzard and Stead. But as Trinca observes, there is a sense of withholding within the letters, especially those between Harrower and Hazzard: “Their neatly typed correspondence was extensive and intense and carefully composed – as if they knew their letters would become part of their public archives.”

Harrower freely admitted to being elusive in interviews: “my whole intention seemed to be to give nothing away, to disguise myself”. Even within the bounds of friendship, Harrower proved to be unknowable – many of her friends reported to Trinca that “she would never talk about herself”. Instead, Harrower focused all her efforts on “mining” other people.

Harrower’s former publicist, Jane Novak, noted that the author was “incredibly observant”. The pair became friends during the last decade of Harrower’s life. Novak said conversations with Harrower gave “nowhere for you to hide, for anyone to hide, because she saw everything”.

How do you write a biography when the subject actively concealed themselves in life and death? Looking for Elizabeth is essentially a well-crafted write-around. It is evident that Trinca applied exhaustive efforts in trying to gather clues. Harrower is refracted through the lives of the people that intersected with hers. Each chapter carefully stakes out the factors that may have pulled Harrower away from writing. In a letter to Shirley Hazzard, Patrick White offered up his own blunt assessment: “Too many vampires make too many demands on her.”

One line of inquiry Trinca establishes is attempting to determine if Harrower was a lesbian. The book is peppered with irritatingly arch and omniscient questions (“So, another small crush on an exotic, older woman?”). As well as more direct musings: “Was Elizabeth’s rejection of the idea she was in love with Kylie a reflection of her feelings or more to do with fear she would be labelled a lesbian at a time when there was still widespread social disapproval of same-sex relationships?”

Eventually, as if conceding, Trinca writes: “Harrower could not point to marriage or children, and without an obvious sexual and romantic history she was hard to categorise.” And therein lies the inherent weakness in Looking for Elizabeth: Trinca’s desire to pin Harrower down, to artfully map out ripples of cause and effect throughout her life.

Looking for Elizabeth becomes most compelling when Trinca holds back from trying to make sense of Harrower’s behaviours and beliefs. This is best done when laying out Harrower’s opinions about multiculturalism and the “special and extended treatment” of Aboriginal people. Trinca goes as far as announcing that she is abandoning these authorial interjections (“Elizabeth was still a Labor devotee but her views were not easily categorised”) before presenting Harrower’s own words from the 1980s to 1990s. A through line of ugly thought appears on the page that isn’t rationalised with discussions about how or why these views were formed.

Despite its subject remaining elliptical and elusive, Looking for Elizabeth continually engages the reader. It also proves that rendering the psychology of others on the page is no easy game.

La Trobe University Press, 320pp, $36.99

La Trobe University Press is a Schwartz imprint

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 23, 2025 as "Helen Trinca, Looking for Elizabeth: The Life of Elizabeth Harrower ".

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