The Transit of Venus

Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) was an Australian novelist and United Nations worker who settled in the United States. The Transit of Venus (1980) is Hazzard’s third novel and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. It draws upon Hazzard’s own experiences of an Australian childhood, emigrating abroad, and being part of the first generation of working women. Critics responded to the juxtaposition of intimate, personal narratives with a broader examination of what it meant to be Australian in the post-WWII Western world. In an obituary for Hazzard, Matthew Specktor wrote that the novel’s central quality was “its elevated, sometimes uncomfortably Olympian, perspective. Which is partly, but not exclusively, tied to its style, an unabashed omniscience that hesitates not at all to tell us things its characters do not know” (Specktor, Matthew. “Shirley Hazzard, 1931-2016.” The Paris Review, 19 Dec. 2016, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/12/19/shirley-hazzard-1921-2016/. Accessed 8 Aug. 2021). Specktor further argues that the novel’s characters

exist within, and at the mercy of, a widest possible cosmos. As the astronomical metaphor of its title suggests, Venus grapples squarely with the unanswerable: the gulf between man and…well, whatever word applies when God seems far too domestic a concept. 

Plot Summary

The Transit of Venus begins with Caro and Grace Bell’s journey from Sydney, Australia to postwar England. Their half-sister Dora, who has been their guardian since their parents’ death in a shipwreck, accompanies them. Grace soon marries the upper-class Englishman Christian Thrale and settles into motherhood and domesticity. Meanwhile, Caro ignores the attentions of Ted Tice, the working-class astronomer who loves her, in order to embark on an affair with Paul Ivory, a playwright who is married to Tertia Drage, a lord’s daughter.

Meanwhile, Caro has been working a government job and occasionally using her meager income to rescue mentally fragile Dora from her latest escapade. When Paul ends the affair, Caro marries Adam Vail, an American businessman. Ted, who continues to love Caro, is devastated. Although Ted also marries, he fails to love his wife, Margaret. In America Caro suffers a miscarriage and propels herself into translating the poems of Latin American dissidents.

When Adam dies of a stroke, Caro’s attention returns to England. Paul makes the startling confession that he had an affair with a working-class man called Victor Locker. When the social and financial pressures of the affair became too much, Paul allowed Victor to drown. The only witness to this incident was Ted. Caro cannot help admiring Ted’s discretion and strength of character. She confesses that she at last returns his love, and the two make plans to be with each other. However, the narrator has previously indicated that Ted will commit suicide at some point in the future, and the imagery of death surrounding Caro further contributes to the conclusion’s sense of foreboding.