Review: The Transit of Venus, by Shirley Hazzard

Published in the eighties, this novel feels like it was born in the 19th century – a classic we are asked to read too young to appreciate in school. I couldn’t remember the last book I read (maybe La Dame aux Camelias) that boldly followed its characters over more than half of their lifetime. And while the structure of Hazzard’s prose has the fineness of the outdated, the deftness with which the characters’ interiorities are revealed (comparable to Henry James’) will capture the empathy of the modern reader. Simply told, The Transit of Venus is a story about two sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, from Australia who move to England to start their lives as women, independent of their mother figure and half-sister Dora. We watch their lives progress through the men they meet. They fall in love, meet their husbands, their lovers, almost effortlessly. Until the final chapter Hazzard will have you hoping for a love story. Despite the relationship driven plot, this story is not that. It manages to be hopelessly romantic and yet blatantly realistic. At times, Hazzard breaks from her plot to describe the actions of the general population, like an overture, like the ominous force of weather with which she opens the novel, suggesting to the reader that under the inexplicable forces that govern our lives, Caro and Grace Bell are as vulnerable, perhaps even as inconsequential, as the undeveloped masses. The ingenuity and complexity of this novel is beautifully irradiated from the first page to the last.