Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus, 1980

Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus, 1980, Readings

Shirley Hazzard’s beloved novel, The Transit of Venus, charts an intimate story with a backdrop of planetary scale. The novel orbits around two orphaned Australian sisters, Caro and Grace, who move to England in the aftermath of World War II to seek love and fortune. Across decades and continents, we watch fateful moments of their youth unfold into tangled futures.

This is a novel about love and secrets, but also about class, colonialism, war, and being pulled into alignment by forces bigger than the self.

Dr Ashley Barnwell

Ashley Barnwell is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Social and Political Sciences. Ashley is interested in sociological aspects of emotions, memory, and narrative, and the role of life writing, archives, and literature in sociological research. She is currently working on an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award Fellowship about family secrets and national silences.