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“The illusion of old solitude”: Shirley Hazzard's Capri

Shirley Hazzard's Greene on Capri provides an account of a Capri habitation that extended, not uninterrupted, but at frequent and regular intervals, from the postwar years until the end of the century through the lens of the longstanding friendship between herself, her husband (literary translator and biographer Francis Steegmuller), author Graham Greene, and a number of Greene's other friends. The focus of Hazzard's memoir is thus on a literary world characterised by a privileged cosmopolitanism and an autodidactic erudition that are now past; the memoir is marked by her sense of this loss as much as it is marked by the loss of her friend and her husband. Her own position, moreover, is marked unmistakably by her sense of the gendered nature of the literary world she inhabited. This essay examines the ways Hazzard's elegiac account of the passing of a particular kind of literary sensibility draws from both the traditions of representing Capri itself but also from a broader tradition of writing and thinking about islands and their place in a rootless, Anglophone cosmopolitanism.