called The Transit of Venus, Hazzard's third novel, her "breakthrough". It follows a pair of sisters from Australia who are living very different lives in postwar Britain. American academic Michael Gorra writes: "Its social landscape will be familiar to any reader of Lessing or Murdoch or Drabble, and yet it is not an English novel. Hazzard lacks the concern with gentility – for or against – that marks almost all English writers of her generation. She has the keenest of eyes for the nuances of class ... and yet doesn't appear to have anything herself at stake in getting it all down." Hazzard's final novel, The Great Fire, appeared more than 20 years later. Its protagonist is a British war hero in Asia a few years after the war. In addition to fiction, Hazzard wrote two nonfiction books critical of the United Nations: Defeat of an Ideal (1973) and Countenance of Truth (1990). Defeat of an Ideal presents evidence of the apparently widespread McCarthyism in the Secretariat from 1951 to 1955. Countenance of Truth alleges that senior international diplomats had been aware of the Nazi past of Kurt Waldheim yet allowed him to rise through the Secretariat ranks to the position of Secretary-General, a claim she first made in a 1980 New Republic article. Her collection of short stories, People in Glass Houses, is presented as a satire on "The Organisation", manifestly inspired by the United Nations. Hazzard wrote Greene on Capri, a memoir of her friendship with her husband Francis Steegmuller, a Flaubert scholar, and his comrade in literature and travel Graham Greene, whom she met in the 1960s and considered an influence. Her last work of nonfiction, The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples (2008), is a collection of writings on Naples co-authored by Steegmuller. Style and themes Hazzard admired the writing of Henry James and Ivy Compton-Burnett, and critics have noted similarities to their work, particularly in the use of dialogue. Critics have called Hazzard's style "austere" and concise. Critics have noted that Hazzard's characters and plots often mirrored events and people in her own life. According to one commentator, Hazzard's early life "was a carbon copy of Helen Driscoll's" (the heroine of The Great Fire). Helen and her brother, the dying Benedict, are described as "wonderfully well-read, a poetic pair who live in literature", and Hazzard once said that poetry had always been the centre of her