So long, Shirley Hazzard, stylish doyen of passion

Much as I wish I was wrong about this, my sense is that too few people have read Shirley Hazzard, who died last week at the age of 85. But then, even in her lifetime, she was a writer who kept disappearing from view. After publishing her second novel, The Bay of Noon, in 1970, it was a decade before she finished her third, The Transit of Venus, and a further 23 years before she delivered her fourth and last, The Great Fire. In between, she produced very little: a couple of books about the United Nations, and a short (and brilliant) memoir of her friend, Graham Greene.

It took me ages to get round to her. I suppose I was put off by the way people compared her to Henry James, though I later found out that she wasn’t under his influence at all. Then, a few years ago, I judged the Lost Man Booker prize, a competition between a bunch of novels from 1970, and so it was that I read The Bay of Noon.

Set in Naples just after the war, it tells the story of a young woman, Jenny, who is working for Nato. All at sea in this fabulous city – Naples, so civilised and yet so destroyed, is the book’s most important character – she follows up a letter of introduction, which is how she meets the beautiful Gioconda, and her lover, Gianni. Thereafter, she finds herself in a complicated quadrille with these two, and a colleague, a passive Scotsman called Justin.

Occasionally, a writer is so absolutely to one’s own taste it’s almost frightening: even as you sink down gratefully into their sentences, you can’t forget that this person was out there all the time. How easily they eluded you! This is what I feel about Hazzard. I love the way she writes, of course: I can’t think of many novelists who manage to be so austere, and so lush and elliptical. But I also appreciate the fact that her characters have not been brought up in the expectation of happiness (something that is probably just as well given the cruelties she inflicts on them). In their reticence, I see not only simmering passion, but also those increasingly unappreciated virtues: hope, gratitude, a self-control that is by any other name kindness.