In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, renowned journalist and author Susan Wyndham chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while researching and crafting Elizabeth Harrower: The Woman in the Watch Tower.
Best biographies & memoirs of 2025: Sydney Morning Herald
The Woman in the Watch Tower
Why would a novelist vanish from the literary scene at the peak of her career? That question lies at the heart of Elizabeth Harrower’s life story. An Australian author who crafted five intense, original and highly regarded novels, Harrower abruptly stopped writing.
In Elizabeth Harrower: The Woman in the Watch Tower, Susan Wyndham wrestles with the elusive Harrower, immersing us in the novelist’s tumultuous family life and friendships with literary figures. Drawing on personal interviews, deep research and time spent with Harrower herself, Wyndham unmasks an enigmatic, literary legend.
Elizabeth Harrower
The book’s title, The Woman in the Watch Tower, echoes Harrower’s masterpiece novel while capturing the dual meaning of her life: as a solitary observer perched above Sydney Harbour, watching and listening to others, and as the figure in the castle’s watchtower of the Bluebeard legend, waiting, watching and enduring coercive control. This layering of meaning transforms title into insight.
The Role of a Literary Biographer
Wyndham’s archival research was exhaustive. She spent three months at the National Library of Australia on a fellowship studying Harrower’s papers. Included were manuscripts, correspondence and unpublished stories, revealing a portrait of emotional complexity that surface memories had obscured. By cross-referencing letters to Shirley Hazzard, Margaret Dick and Christina Stead, Wyndham discovered how Harrower presented different selves to various people. When diaries had been destroyed for privacy’s sake, Wyndham accessed vital information from divorce papers and Trove searches to reconstruct Harrower’s turbulent family history.
Elizabeth and her cousin Margaret
Susan Wyndham wove literary criticism throughout the chronological narrative, placing novels and stories where they illuminated the periods of Harrower’s life that had inspired them. Wyndham concluded that Harrower’s novels were the key to understanding their author’s character, personality and behaviour.
Why Elizabeth Harrower Stopped Writing
Wyndham balanced acute psychological insight with literary analysis, transforming Harrower’s life story into an intimate portrait. She positions the novelist’s decision to stop writing as an accumulation of professional disappointment, personal loss and the slow drift into a different kind of life rather than the result of a single cataclysmic event.
Praise for The Woman in the Watch Tower
‘Elizabeth Harrower: The woman in the watch tower is the first (and perhaps final) word on one of Australia’s most brilliant and bedevelling writers. Like Harrower’s, Wyndham’s prose is meticulously observed, emotionally attuned and full of grace, insight and vision.
It’s a fantastic achievement.’
– Dominic Amerena
‘This is an extraordinary biography of one of the finest, and most important, Australian writers, Elizabeth Harrower. In a braiding so skilled you can’t see it, Susan Wyndham takes us from Harrower’s life into her work and her friendships, and then back into her work and life. This is a deceptively simple, beautifully detailed, psychologically acute portrait worthy of its subject.’
– Anna Funder
‘This is a wonderful book. It gives us the complexities of Harrower’s life and of her fascinating character – so naïve and at the same time so intelligent, her prickly diffidence coupled with a kind of gormless passion. And it sets her compellingly into the decades when modern Australian literature was coming into being. An indispensable contribution to Australian writing.’
– Brigitta Olubas
‘This much-awaited biography peels back the layers on Australian literary legend Elizabeth Harrower, who died in 2020 after decades as an enigmatic figure.’
– Melanie Kembrey, SMH/The Age
‘A sympathetic and illuminating exploration of the life and work of one of post-war Australia’s most significant writers.’
– Books + Publishing
‘In these early chapters Wyndham is particularly good at using Harrower’s fiction to recreate the lonely child and the two Newcastle families, especially the Hughes grandmother (clearly the model for Lilian in The Long Prospect): “wild, funny, generous and a bully: ‘She could out-shout and out-pose Bette Davis’.” She is also illuminating in showing how the story “Alice” can be read as an allegory of Harrower’s mother, the good and beautiful child who grew up to be a woman “inordinately reluctant to learn from experience.” Such descriptions enliven the narrative while never insisting that these characters are exact replicas of family members.
‘In Wyndham’s reading, Harrower’s devotion to a range of friends, and relatives of friends, may have served as a source of material for books, an arena for her to give and receive kindness, or even an excuse for procrastination.’
Ramona Koval, Australian Book Review, September 2025.
The Woman in the Watch Tower Media Coverage
She created one of Australian literature’s most loathsome monsters. I had to find out how
‘Letter writing with Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower’
Susan Wyndham appeared on Late Night Live with host Phillip Adams on 2 May 2024. This interview was part of a broader discussion about the letters between Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower, which provided context for The Woman in the Watch Tower.
ABC Radio National, Late Night Live
‘Elizabeth Harrower, the forgotten Australian writer of the 20th century’
Susan Wyndham was interviewed by Suzanne Hill on the ABC Nightlife program. The segment explored Elizabeth Harrower as ‘the forgotten Australian writer of the 1960s’ and discussed Wyndham’s biography The Woman in the Watchtower
Susan Wyndham on Elizabeth Harrower and a Life in Literature
Susan Wyndham was interviewed by Cheryl Akle for the ‘Stories Behind the Story’ podcast. The episode was published in November 2024. In this conversation, Wyndham discussed researching Elizabeth Harrower: The Woman in the Watch Tower. She explained how her mother’s love of books shaped her own literary career, her career in journalism and her path to becoming one of Australia’s leading literary editors.
Stories Behind The Story Podcast
The Woman in the Watchtower by Susan Wyndham
Hosts Cath and Annie featured Wyndham’s biography in Episode 59 titled ‘The Woman in the Watchtower’. The episode took a deep dive into the brilliant, celebrated, and mysterious life of Elizabeth Harrower, author of the 1960s Australian classic The Watch Tower.
Tsundoku Podcast - Episode 59
‘Vanishing Histories’
Susan Wyndham participated in a conversation presented by Sydney Writers’ Festival and supported by UNSW Sydney, in partnership with the State Library of New South Wales. The event featured Kerrie Davies and Yves Rees in conversation with Susan Wyndham about forgotten Australian writers, including Elizabeth Harrower.
UNSW Centre for Ideas - Vanishing Histories
Susan Wyndham is a writer and journalist who has been New York correspondent for The Australian newspaper and literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. Her most recent book, co-edited with Brigitta Olubas, is Hazzard and Harrower: The letters. In 2024, she was awarded a National Library of Australia Fellowship to research the life of Elizabeth Harrower.