Greene On Capri

Author(s): Shirley Hazzard

General | Literary

When friends die, one's own credentials change: one becomes a survivor. Graham Greene has already had biographers, one of whom has served him mightily. Yet I hope that there is room for the remembrance of a friend who knew him - not wisely, perhaps, but fairly well - on an island that was "not his kind of place," but where he came season after season, year after year where he, too, will be subsumed into the capacious story.' For millennia the cliffs of Capri have sheltered pleasure-seekers refugees alike, among them the emperors Augustus Tiberius, Henry James, Rilke Lenin, plus hosts of artists, eccentrics outcasts. Here in the 1960s Graham Greene became friends with Shirley Hazzard her husband, the writer Francis Steegmuller; their friendship lasted until Greene's death in 1991. In GREENE ON CAPRI, Hazzard uses their ever volatile intimacy as a prism through which to illuminate Greene's mercurial character, his work talk the extraordinary literary culture that long thrived on this ravishing, enchanted island.


Product Information

*Review round-ups in the national press and women's magazines *To be featured on the Virago web-site

'A little masterpiece of reminiscence' MAIL ON SUNDAY 'Her observations are penetrating, her style is superb, and her range of literary reference is the equal of his. Marvellous' TIME OUT 'Shirley Hazzard achieves an astonishing amount in less than 150 pages ... Her memoir, like the island it so fondly describes, is a real gem to which the reader will wish to return' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

Shirley Hazzard was born in Sydney in 1931. She has worked in Hong Kong, then New Zealand in the High Commissioner's Office. In 1951 she moved to New York where she worked for the United Nations. She is the recepient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy Award and the O. Henry Short Story Award.

General Fields

  • : 9781860498732
  • : Little, Brown Book Group Limited
  • : Sphere
  • : 0.177
  • : February 2001
  • : 198mm X 124mm
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Shirley Hazzard
  • : Paperback
  • : English
  • : 823.914
  • : illustrations