THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020 71
always with the impression that some-
thing very real and a little beyond lan-
guage has happened to me. I’m des-
perate to talk about the book with those
who have read it, and find myself at
some remove from those who haven’t.
In this way—Was it like this for you,
too?—the novel is akin to sex or drugs
or physical pain. “A state of mind,” one
character warns another, “will overtake
you like an event.” Each time I begin
the novel, I laugh a little at the first
line, pretending for a moment that it
refers to me: “By nightfall the head-
lines would be reporting devastation.”
“The Transit of Venus” opens, like
a fairy tale, in the middle of a storm.
Ted Tice, a young man carrying a de-
caying suitcase, appears at the door of
his future employer, an arrogant as-
tronomer of wealth and stature. At the
astronomer’s lavish English country
home, Ted meets Grace and Caroline
Bell, two beautiful orphaned sisters—
one fair, one dark—who have left their
far-off kingdom of Australia in search
of a new life in a more civilized world.
Grace, the fair sister, is engaged to the
astronomer’s son, a seething civil ser-
vant named Christian Thrale. Ted falls
in love with the dark sister, Caroline,
who herself is in love with Paul Ivory,
a manipulative playwright engaged to
an aristocrat from a nearby manor.
From this cut-diamond opening, the
rest of the novel’s plot flickers and re-
fracts. Caroline, known as Caro, has an
affair with Paul and, when it ends, is
overtaken by a desperate depression.
She is rescued by a gallant American
of virtuous pursuits, whom she mar-
ries. Christian and Grace temporarily
fall in love with other people. The years
pass, Ted rises to professional promi-
nence and gets married himself. Still,
he loves Caro, who has become for him
a legend. And then a rival dies, a life-
long love is returned. When calamity
strikes, we realize it was always to be
so—that breadcrumbs, dropped for
years, have made a trail leading straight
to tragedy.
Throughout, the outsized emotions
become ours. When Ted first visits
Caro at her husband’s house (“To come
and go at will, forever, across this thresh-
old was not simply a happiness denied
him but held so large a meaning that
it seemed scarcely permissible to any-
1
Correction of the Week
From the Financial Times.An earlier version of this article incorrectly
stated the Salt Lake Tribune has a full-time jazz
reporter. It in fact has two reporters who cover
Utah Jazz, the local basketball team.one”), or Grace becomes infatuated
with her son’s doctor (“The trouble
was, the very abundance of her feel-
ings sufficed for mutuality”), or Chris-
tian regrets falling in love with his sec-
retary (“If only the tinderbox condition
of the globe would obscure, minimize,
or even make irrelevant his own di-
lemma”), we experience our sympathy
for them in the same way that Ted
presents his love to Caro: “As wisdom,
even genius.”
“The Transit of Venus” articulates
the values by which it seeks to be judged:
one character is praised for having a
“meticulous voice from another cen-
tury”; a second, for his “fidelity to un-
fashionable ideals.” A book within the
book passes the ultimate test: “Open
at any page and find truth, like the
Bible.” Hazzard’s own fearless pursuits
of “ideals” and “truth,” her absolutely
sincere belief in the power of art, her
insistence on the huge meaning of sin-
gle lives, produces a plot of unapolo-
getically wide scope. Characters seduce,
wed, widow. They betray and grant
mercy. They break one another’s hearts
and attempt to mend them only after
it’s too late. Beliefs espoused in youth
gain dramatic irony from the vantage
of old age. Life-altering events are re-
vealed in offhand comments or clause-
long slips into the future tense. Em-
ergencies occur off the page. Words
spoken by one character will be remem-
bered, years later, by another. The terms
of the novel’s contract are clear: one
must read it with unusually close at-
tention; in exchange, astonishment will
be granted.
Few other twentieth-century au-
thors dared the audacity of Hazzard’s
melodrama. The sense of destiny that
shrouds her characters gives them—
and, by some transitive property, the
reader—an archaic grandeur of feel-
ing. Perhaps you really are fated to live
where and when you do, surrounded
by secret heroes and villains. Perhaps
you really were meant to have fallen
in love with that person and to have
had him cleaved from you on the exact
date that he was. Hazzard’s plots give
us permission to imbue our own lives
with great significance. As Ted tells
Caro when they are young, “Maybe
the element of coincidence is played
down in literature because it seems likecheating or can’t be made believable.
Whereas life itself doesn’t have to be
fair, or convincing.”N
o doubt the same holds true of lit-
erary careers. Although Hazzard’s
earliest short stories had a wide and so-
phisticated audience by virtue of being
published in this magazine, and both
“The Transit of Venus” and “The Great
Fire” won literary awards, her work is
rarely taught at universities. It’s neither
fair nor convincing but simply true that
her fiction, which broke no new ground
stylistically or thematically, does not fit
into the chronology of twentieth-cen-
tury literature. Hazzard, in being from
everywhere—Australia, America, Eu-
rope—was of nowhere. “A conscious
act of independent humanity is what
society can least afford,” Ted warns in
“The Transit of Venus,” and perhaps
this is why Hazzard isn’t quite as cele-
brated as everyone who has read her
work thinks she ought to be.
Yet what society can least afford is
what Hazzard’s readers find most reward-
ing. Like a photographic master of deep
focus, Hazzard is able to keep both sin-
gle lives and mass events in sharp defi-
nition. Love between two people is not
minor, she argues, and no amount of
world-historical suffering will make it so.
Many of us have, in recent years, come
to live the way the sisters in “The Tran-
sit of Venus” do when they are young:
with “esteem for dispassion” and an
“aversion to emotion.” This is what con-
temporary novels typically supply. More
important, it is what our world demands;
we know that caring about everything
as much as it deserves to be cared about
would be ruinous to our psyches. But
Grace and Caroline Bell change over
the years, and their stories invite us to
feel with abandon. From “beyond the
Equator that equalized nothing,” they
sense a possible future. They start “to
yearn, perverse and unknowing, towards
some strength that would, in turn, dis-
turb that equilibrium and sweep them
to higher ground.”