Shirley Hazzard's writing is like some electronic mechanism, enormously intricate in design and function, charged with great power, but so refined by skill that it may be contained in a small case and exhibit a smooth and shapely surface.

The surface of ["The Evening of the Holiday"] … tells us how an Italian man and an Englishwoman meet and fall in love in an Italian town, and how their subsequent, rather undramatic, affair develops. But beneath the surface is a complexity of ideas and effects—and of ancestors. Miss Hazzard tells us that Keats is the forebear of her heroine; among her own are Hawthorne, Henry James and E. M. Forster. Like them, she deals with the perpetually fascinating and valid problems of a woman of northern antecedents and inhibitions confronting the easy sensuality of the Italian male. Upon this foundation—or volcano—she has constructed her complicated and...