Elizabeth Harrower: Critical Essays

Abstract

2014 saw the long-awaited first publication of Elizabeth Harrower’s final novel, 'In Certain Circles', written nearly four decades earlier and withdrawn by the author shortly before its scheduled publication by Macmillan in 1971. This belated publication itself enacted a form of literary revival, not least in bearing the impress of international endorsement in the form of a “Rediscovering Harrower” essay by James Wood in the New Yorker. Just ahead of this publication, Harrower said in an interview with Susan Wyndham that part of the reason she withdrew the novel from publication might have had to do with the death of her mother, which had left her “frozen” with grief; she also claimed to have forgotten the novel, and to be no longer interested in it, or in her writing life, or indeed in writing at all.