In Certain Circles

‘Harrower can pierce your heart.’ * Michael Dirda, Washington Post *
‘A scandalously overlooked writer.’ * Michelle de Kretser *
‘A coup…weirdly thrilling line by line…[its] dense and adult conversation crackles with a sense of moral urgency.’ – Delia Falconer * Australian *
‘Utterly hypnotic.’ * Eimear McBride, Irish Times *
‘She is brilliant on power, isolation and class.’ * Ramona Koval, Australian *
‘Her insights into the nature of love, the role of women and the torsions of power in even the most ordinary relationship are bitter and sometimes cruel, wielded in the way that acute honesty may be, like a whip. Yet they are always delivered via the honeyed dipper of her prose.’ – Geordie Williamson * Monthly *
‘A novel of astonishing psychological insight exploring the darker aspects of human attraction.’ * Saturday Paper *
‘An exploration of the psychologies of entitlement and deprivation in the context of love.’ Book of the Week * Adelaide Advertiser *
‘Reading In Certain Circles gave me the thrill that only comes from the work of a major novelist.’ – The Conversation
‘In Certain Circles is subtle yet wounding, and very much alive.’ * Guardian *
‘A brilliant exploration of relationships, marriage, thwarted passion and the beauty and the price of love.’ * Herald Sun *
‘There are many wonderful things in this novel. Harrower’s skill in evoking a place is impressive. Her eye for oddities of behaviour, for quirks of character and for patches of pretentiousness is as sure as ever. The wry intelligence of her view of middle-class Australian life is evident throughout. Her writing is characteristically sharp and pithy. Whatever the reason behind her decision not to allow this novel to be released four decades ago, its rebirth is an event to be celebrated.’ – Andrew Riemer * SMH/Age/Canberra Times *
‘With its flavor of Henry James, Harrower’s rediscovered story is an odd, brittle yet impressive piece of work that exposes the complex passions beneath a drawing-room-scenario surface.’ * Kirkus Reviews *
‘A stark, uncompromising drama of marital imprisonment and psychological manipulation. In its atmosphere of dread and compulsion it has elements of Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic suspense novels. But Ms. Harrower’s fearsome objectivity and her bristling, beautiful prose come from modernist masters like Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen.’ * Wall Street Journal *
‘Harrower was right about In Certain Circles being well written, but surely wrong to take its superb style for granted, as if mere literary muscle memory. Like the rest of her work, the novel is severely achieved: the coolly exact prose cannot be distinguished from the ashen exhaustion of its tragic fires…The book belongs with her best work, with The Watch Tower and The Long Prospect…[It] is more explicit than Harrower’s earlier work about ideological tensions between men and women. It is also broader in scope and not as angry—wiser and less hopeless.’ – James Wood * New Yorker *
‘Harrower evokes the waste and futility of a decadent class with all the bite and poignancy of F. Scott Fitzgerald.’ – Eimear McBride * New Statesman *
‘In Certain Circles [is] a pin-sharp psychological drama about two pairs of siblings, set on the shores of Sydney Harbour. Harrower’s searing, spare prose is breathtaking, as is her depiction of dashed promise and the gulf beween the sexes.’ – Di Speirs, BBC Radio Books Editor
‘Intensely psychological…exquisitely chiselled prose.’ * North and South *
‘For me, the great discovery of 2014 was the work of Elizabeth Harrower.’ * Favourite Books of 2014, New Yorker *
‘Elizabeth Harrower’s unpublished In Certain Circles finally gets its moment in the sun, and it’s been well worth the wait.’ * Australian Financial Review *
‘Harrower’s prose is watchful, witty, unillusioned, exultant. Its healthful vitality–vivid, accurate, alive to irony–is a dashing stand against its subject matter: human perversity, so often squalid, senseless, swallowing all meaning.’ * Times Literary Supplement *
‘An exquisitely crafted story about the impact of love, class and privilege on the quest for personal fulfilment.’ * Lady *
‘In this screw-turning, chilling study of a suburban sadist, all the elements of Harrower’s oeuvre — fairytale, existentialism, human wasters and willing victims —come together with the perfect inevitability that makes a classic.’ * Weekend Australian *
‘A novelist who deserves as wide an audience as possible.’ * Sunday Age *
‘There is a note of elegy in all of Harrower’s work, even as the adrenaline flows, and a lyricism reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald at his desperate best.’ * Times Literary Supplement *
‘This magnificently sad and funny novel about two sets of brothers and sisters was released for the first time in 2015 and is the best skewering of life between the sexes since Mary McCarthy’s The Group.’ * Boston Globe, Best Books of 2015 *

Elizabeth Harrower was born in Sydney in 1928 and moved to London in 1951. She travelled extensively and began to write fiction. Her first novel Down in the City was published in 1957, and was followed by The Long Prospect a year later. In 1959 she returned to Sydney where she began working for the ABC and as a book reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald. In 1960 she published The Catherine Wheel, the story of an Australian law student in London, her only novel not set in Sydney.

The Watch Tower appeared in 1966. No further novels were published until May 2014 when Harrower’s ‘lost’ novel, In Certain Circles, was released. Her work is austere, intelligent, ruthless in its perceptions about men and women. She was admired by many of her contemporaries, including Patrick White and Christina Stead, and is without doubt among the most important writers of the postwar period in Australia.

Elizabeth Harrower died in Sydney on 7 July 2020 at the age of ninety-two.

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