It’s said that The Transit of Venus took Hazzard twenty-seven drafts. I find it reassuring to learn that those sentences—that novel—didn’t simply arrive on the page.

Equally, I’m moved by Hazzard’s patient labor; there’s humility in assuming that one’s writing requires improvement. And I salute her respect for her readers: her desire to present us with the best she could do.

Hazzard had a remarkable feeling for narrative structure: for twisty chronologies, reversals, delays. Look at the way she handles revelations of death: Justin’s in The Bay of Noon, Adam’s in The Transit of Venus; most famously, Caro’s fate. Like Ted’s suicide, these endings are communicated incidentally, almost dismissively. In fiction, death—like sex—is often overwrought. But in Hazzard, details are scant or nonexistent. Her revelations are built on concealment, withholding; the risk of florid sentiment is dodged. The moment of disclosure arrives, passes swiftly, is over. The reader is devastated. That’s all.

Charlotte Wood remarks on this, likening the end of The Transit of Venus to the way we learn of Mrs. Ramsay’s death in To the Lighthouse. It’s an astute comparison, one that prompted me to think about a difference between the two writers. The audacity of Virginia Woolf’s maneuver affects not only the reader but also the fragmented narrative—I daresay it affected Woolf herself. No one had done anything like it before her: the gasp is hers as well as ours. In Hazzard’s novels, the shock is felt as fully by the reader but is assimilated by the narrative: there’s no disruption of form. Woolf pauses, astonished by her boldness, the risk taken and carried off. Hazzard—cool customer—moves on without a backward glance. It’s the difference between the high modernist moment and its mid-century iteration; the lesson absorbed.

An email from Josephine Rowe remarks on the way novelists can be attentive to “echoes”: “those pantoum-like repetitions, the way they decay or amplify over the course of a life.” Echo patterning is abundant in Hazzard’s work. It’s one reason her novels linger so long in the mind.

Chris Andrews, reading The Transit of Venus for the first time, points out an echo I’ve missed. When the young woman who tried to warm a soldier’s missing feet has grown older, she stands at the bedside of her dying husband and touches the outline of his feet before covering them with a blanket. A hundred or so pages separate the two scenes. A further hundred and fifty pages on, by which time the woman is very old and has dementia, she sees a professor on television explain the origin of the phrase “to have cold feet.”...