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Elizabeth Harrower: The Woman in the Watch Tower
Australian novelist Elizabeth Harrower wrote some of the most intense, original and highly regarded psychological fiction of the twentieth century. Then she abruptly stopped writing in the 1970s and became one of the most puzzling mysteries of Australian literature. Why didn't she continue? Harrower gave elusive answers to friends and interviewers, and only since her death in 2020 has a deeper search been possible.
When Harrower's four novels were brought back into print between 2012 and 2014, followed by a novel she had withdrawn from her publisher in 1971 and a collection of her short stories, a renaissance of admiration followed. In this engrossing biography, Susan Wyndham grapples with the questions that remained unanswered, the dynamics of Harrower's circles of famous friends, and her remarkable books and their timeless dissections of the human heart.
When Harrower's four novels were brought back into print between 2012 and 2014, followed by a novel she had withdrawn from her publisher in 1971 and a collection of her short stories, a renaissance of admiration followed. In this engrossing biography, Susan Wyndham grapples with the questions that remained unanswered, the dynamics of Harrower's circles of famous friends, and her remarkable books and their timeless dissections of the human heart.
336 pages, Paperback
Published October 1, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 27, 2025
Elizabeth Harrower first came to my notice via the ABC program, The Book Club, in 2013 when The Watch Tower was featured as Marieke Hardy’s selection for the month. It had not long been reissued as a Text Classic at that point. I ordered a copy and read it immediately and had full intentions of reading more of Harrower’s work, but as time went by, this fell by the wayside. It wasn’t until receiving an advance copy of this biography, that I decided to revisit this plan of reading all of Elizabeth Harrower’s novels, preferably in the order they were originally published, so I could get a sense of her writing as it evolved over time and appreciate it with fresh (older) eyes and within the context of what I now know about Harrower’s life, writing, and influences.
‘…living with Kempley was the unwanted gift she needed as a writer, a source for every villain she could imagine. Shards of his history are scattered through her fiction.’
This biography was such an insightful and immersive read. It begins with Harrower’s childhood and follows a chronological path through her life. Interwoven along the way is an analysis of her work, the highlighting of key influences, the stories behind the stories, so to speak. From birth through to old age, Susan Wyndham lays Harrower’s life open for us: the writing, the friendships, the family, the sadness and gladness; there is little left to wonder about. This biography is also a brilliant snapshot of the Australian literary scene, showcasing what a small universe this was in post-war Australia. Every author seemed to know each other, either as acquaintances, or with deeper friendships. I really appreciated this aspect of the biography, not only for the way in which it added to Harrower’s personal story, but simply because I am endlessly curious about social history.
‘This was the whole point of Harrower’s fiction, that people got away with appalling behaviour, and that wives did not always win nor even deserve to. Her hard-learned understanding of human nature did not fit with the commercial desire for happy endings.’
The insight gained from reading this biography certainly led me to exploring Harrower’s novels and short fiction, and I hope that other readers will feel the same. The influence of her stepfather on her work cannot be overstated. He is evident in so many of the men she wrote, and it appears that he cast a long shadow over her own personal life. Since reading this biography, I have read Harrower’s first two novels, along with her short story collection. I had initially thought that I would devour all of her novels, one after the other, but I couldn’t do it. The knowledge of her life and the influences she drew upon to write all of her fiction, combined with her brilliance as a writer at conveying fear, trauma, pain, and despair, means that her work, for me at least, is something I need to pace myself with. Each new exposure to her fiction almost causes me a measure of grief intermingled with awe.
I highly recommend this biography. It’s incredibly well researched and provides readers with an immensely personal and insightful account of the life of one of Australia’s literary icons, Elizabeth Harrower.
Thanks to @newsouthpublishing for the review copy and to Susan Wyndham for her dedication to Elizabeth Harrower.
‘…living with Kempley was the unwanted gift she needed as a writer, a source for every villain she could imagine. Shards of his history are scattered through her fiction.’
This biography was such an insightful and immersive read. It begins with Harrower’s childhood and follows a chronological path through her life. Interwoven along the way is an analysis of her work, the highlighting of key influences, the stories behind the stories, so to speak. From birth through to old age, Susan Wyndham lays Harrower’s life open for us: the writing, the friendships, the family, the sadness and gladness; there is little left to wonder about. This biography is also a brilliant snapshot of the Australian literary scene, showcasing what a small universe this was in post-war Australia. Every author seemed to know each other, either as acquaintances, or with deeper friendships. I really appreciated this aspect of the biography, not only for the way in which it added to Harrower’s personal story, but simply because I am endlessly curious about social history.
‘This was the whole point of Harrower’s fiction, that people got away with appalling behaviour, and that wives did not always win nor even deserve to. Her hard-learned understanding of human nature did not fit with the commercial desire for happy endings.’
The insight gained from reading this biography certainly led me to exploring Harrower’s novels and short fiction, and I hope that other readers will feel the same. The influence of her stepfather on her work cannot be overstated. He is evident in so many of the men she wrote, and it appears that he cast a long shadow over her own personal life. Since reading this biography, I have read Harrower’s first two novels, along with her short story collection. I had initially thought that I would devour all of her novels, one after the other, but I couldn’t do it. The knowledge of her life and the influences she drew upon to write all of her fiction, combined with her brilliance as a writer at conveying fear, trauma, pain, and despair, means that her work, for me at least, is something I need to pace myself with. Each new exposure to her fiction almost causes me a measure of grief intermingled with awe.
I highly recommend this biography. It’s incredibly well researched and provides readers with an immensely personal and insightful account of the life of one of Australia’s literary icons, Elizabeth Harrower.
Thanks to @newsouthpublishing for the review copy and to Susan Wyndham for her dedication to Elizabeth Harrower.
Read
November 4, 2025Elizabeth Harrower, Sydney's post-war chronicler of domestic entrapment and wizard of dramatising psychological manipulation was a private person, whose masterpiece, The Watch Tower, was published in 1966.
Before her archives were made public, Harrower destroyed 400 pages of unpublished writing, "secrets and so on" (her words). Five years after her death, biographies by Susan Wyndham and Helen Trinca appear intent on compensating for the loss. Each is explicit about their mode: psychological sleuthing, though their detective work strains.
Commenting on a possible connection between The Watch Tower's tyrannical husband, Felix Shaw, and Harrower's stepfather, Richard Kempley, Wyndham writes, "Whether Kempley was quite as malevolent as Shaw can't be proven."
So why litigate it? Wyndham continues: “There are no police records or charges of violence against him, no letters from Harrower that detail his sins." The tone is a giveaway - we are in the pearl clutchers' tribunal, the kingdom of the busybody seeking dirt, shame, and punishment.
Is Harrower's life no more than a daytime courtroom drama? The fiction primarily evidence in a posthumous trial? Certainly, Certainly, there might be "sins" to discover, but Wyndham doesn't go beyond brute hypothesis. This tendency towards prurient speculation leads the biographer to begin arguing with her subject. Harrower may "insist" that The Watch Tower was "pure fiction" - but, Wyndham hedges, "she always did". So scepticism is warranted. And anyway, "at the end of her life she told at least one friend the novel was autobiographical". Case closed. Wyndham puts a brave face on the whole affair: “Whatever suffering Kempley inflicted was transformed into a masterpiece.”
Heaven forbid suffering should fail to result in masterpieces. Putting aside the cliches (tortured artists, narrative as psychodrama) being invoked, why insist on making the life and the fiction elaborate one another so mechanically?
What Wyndham does here is reduce misogyny. Gendered relations, no longer a structural web of power disparities an author can observe and transfigure, become a coathanger for the fiction to rest upon. But violence and abuse do not need to be turned into speculative journalism to have power - and there is no doubt, as Wyndham notes, that Harrower felt Kempley was a “poisonous man”.
Wyndham partially admits this: "While there were endless men Harrower could observe to create her antagonist, Richard Kempley was her reason for doing so." By the time Wyndham spells it out ("But this is a novel not a memoir"), the idea Harrower's fiction might do more than provide scaffolding for biographies seems almost too much to ask. As author Fiona McGregor remarks, to read Harrower as an exposé of misogyny is reductive, "if not defensive": "What she exposes is the will to power."
In another speculative gambit, Wyndham tries to link Harrower and suicidal ideation. “There's no evidence that she considered suicide herself after the time she lay on the road as a child," Wyndham writes, "but she had been close to emotional collapse" Whether this is an attempt to flesh out Wyndham's otherwise excellent consideration of Harrower's fictional writing of suicide, or simply a way to place Harrower among female writers who took their lives, the results are questionable. It seems part of Wyndham's compulsive need to have Harrower's work back up her life and vice versa, as though the one existed only to corroborate and validate the other.
Wyndham's biography is elsewhere compelling, gossipy and witty. Trinca and Wyndham have clearly thought with and through Harrower's archives. When Wyndham gives the reader her own sense of Harrower's writing, the results are illuminating.
Trinca, for better or worse, seems less invested in Harrower's writing, often deferring to Harrower's contemporaries and appreciators. Trinca suffers, too, from Wyndham's appetite for having the life serve as material for fictional catharsis and masterpiece-making. ("She may not have lived every experience she wrote about," Trinca sighs.) Whereas Wyndham's book builds towards an elegant conclusion, Trinca's dissipates into book-report cutesy-ness rhapsodising the "little girl from Newcastle [who] always believed her duty was to pass on messages about the world"
A fascinating figure in each book, novelist and playwright Kylie Tennant was a friend yet someone with whom Harrower had a complicated, at times difficult relationship.
An older married woman, her anthropological realism was wholly unlike Harrower's interior mode. Trinca assigns Tennant a strong role as Harrower's unrequited lover; Wyndham is more circumspect on the idea.
Read on:
https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/...
Before her archives were made public, Harrower destroyed 400 pages of unpublished writing, "secrets and so on" (her words). Five years after her death, biographies by Susan Wyndham and Helen Trinca appear intent on compensating for the loss. Each is explicit about their mode: psychological sleuthing, though their detective work strains.
Commenting on a possible connection between The Watch Tower's tyrannical husband, Felix Shaw, and Harrower's stepfather, Richard Kempley, Wyndham writes, "Whether Kempley was quite as malevolent as Shaw can't be proven."
So why litigate it? Wyndham continues: “There are no police records or charges of violence against him, no letters from Harrower that detail his sins." The tone is a giveaway - we are in the pearl clutchers' tribunal, the kingdom of the busybody seeking dirt, shame, and punishment.
Is Harrower's life no more than a daytime courtroom drama? The fiction primarily evidence in a posthumous trial? Certainly, Certainly, there might be "sins" to discover, but Wyndham doesn't go beyond brute hypothesis. This tendency towards prurient speculation leads the biographer to begin arguing with her subject. Harrower may "insist" that The Watch Tower was "pure fiction" - but, Wyndham hedges, "she always did". So scepticism is warranted. And anyway, "at the end of her life she told at least one friend the novel was autobiographical". Case closed. Wyndham puts a brave face on the whole affair: “Whatever suffering Kempley inflicted was transformed into a masterpiece.”
Heaven forbid suffering should fail to result in masterpieces. Putting aside the cliches (tortured artists, narrative as psychodrama) being invoked, why insist on making the life and the fiction elaborate one another so mechanically?
What Wyndham does here is reduce misogyny. Gendered relations, no longer a structural web of power disparities an author can observe and transfigure, become a coathanger for the fiction to rest upon. But violence and abuse do not need to be turned into speculative journalism to have power - and there is no doubt, as Wyndham notes, that Harrower felt Kempley was a “poisonous man”.
Wyndham partially admits this: "While there were endless men Harrower could observe to create her antagonist, Richard Kempley was her reason for doing so." By the time Wyndham spells it out ("But this is a novel not a memoir"), the idea Harrower's fiction might do more than provide scaffolding for biographies seems almost too much to ask. As author Fiona McGregor remarks, to read Harrower as an exposé of misogyny is reductive, "if not defensive": "What she exposes is the will to power."
In another speculative gambit, Wyndham tries to link Harrower and suicidal ideation. “There's no evidence that she considered suicide herself after the time she lay on the road as a child," Wyndham writes, "but she had been close to emotional collapse" Whether this is an attempt to flesh out Wyndham's otherwise excellent consideration of Harrower's fictional writing of suicide, or simply a way to place Harrower among female writers who took their lives, the results are questionable. It seems part of Wyndham's compulsive need to have Harrower's work back up her life and vice versa, as though the one existed only to corroborate and validate the other.
Wyndham's biography is elsewhere compelling, gossipy and witty. Trinca and Wyndham have clearly thought with and through Harrower's archives. When Wyndham gives the reader her own sense of Harrower's writing, the results are illuminating.
Trinca, for better or worse, seems less invested in Harrower's writing, often deferring to Harrower's contemporaries and appreciators. Trinca suffers, too, from Wyndham's appetite for having the life serve as material for fictional catharsis and masterpiece-making. ("She may not have lived every experience she wrote about," Trinca sighs.) Whereas Wyndham's book builds towards an elegant conclusion, Trinca's dissipates into book-report cutesy-ness rhapsodising the "little girl from Newcastle [who] always believed her duty was to pass on messages about the world"
A fascinating figure in each book, novelist and playwright Kylie Tennant was a friend yet someone with whom Harrower had a complicated, at times difficult relationship.
An older married woman, her anthropological realism was wholly unlike Harrower's interior mode. Trinca assigns Tennant a strong role as Harrower's unrequited lover; Wyndham is more circumspect on the idea.
Read on:
https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/...
January 20, 2026
Interesting read. I also read Helen Trinca's book - unusually they were both released around the same time, not sure why/how that happened?
Wyndham had done A LOT of research, and her biography I found to be more 'at a distance' from Harrower than Trinca. There are a lot of 'what if's' here too - suicide ideation (a stretch) - comparing other female authors around the same time (Charmian Clift, Virginia Woolf); a light touch on Harrower's personal relationships (more so than Trinca who goes into detail about Harrower and Kit, her cousin et al). Wyndham goes through the novels that Harrower wrote and tries to extrapolate into Harrower's own life (perhaps a stretch?)
This work gave me more of an insight into Harrower as being 'old Australia', eg her 'ties' to England, not reading Australian novels, not thinking there were any 'good' Australian actors etc.
We can surmise as to why she 'disappeared', however on reading both books I think her caring duties - for various and many people in her life - took a lot of energy out of her. She threw herself headlong into caring, perhaps (and yes, I'm surmising) wanting to care like she wasn't cared for.
Wyndham had done A LOT of research, and her biography I found to be more 'at a distance' from Harrower than Trinca. There are a lot of 'what if's' here too - suicide ideation (a stretch) - comparing other female authors around the same time (Charmian Clift, Virginia Woolf); a light touch on Harrower's personal relationships (more so than Trinca who goes into detail about Harrower and Kit, her cousin et al). Wyndham goes through the novels that Harrower wrote and tries to extrapolate into Harrower's own life (perhaps a stretch?)
This work gave me more of an insight into Harrower as being 'old Australia', eg her 'ties' to England, not reading Australian novels, not thinking there were any 'good' Australian actors etc.
We can surmise as to why she 'disappeared', however on reading both books I think her caring duties - for various and many people in her life - took a lot of energy out of her. She threw herself headlong into caring, perhaps (and yes, I'm surmising) wanting to care like she wasn't cared for.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews