[Shirley Hazzard has used the phrase 'no-man's land' as] an appropriate correlative to the geographical dislocation which has become such a feature of our own world and times.

The importance of this sense of geographical dislocation is evident in all her work to date: it is common to many of the stories in her first collection, Cliffs of Fall (1963), but more particularly in the two novellas The Evening of the Holiday (1966) and The Bay of Noon (1970). At a quite superficial level it is suggested by the variety of locations she has chosen for her fictions: the novellas are both set in Italy and the short stories take the reader from America to Switzerland, from England to Italy. (p. 182)

The 'loss of geographical and, to some extent, national and even social, sense of belonging' is a deprivation suffered by many of Shirley Hazzard's heroines and is particularly true of...