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48 pages 1 hour read

Shirley Hazzard

The Transit of Venus

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1980

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Part 1, Chapters 1-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1: “The Old World”

Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary

On a stormy night, Ted Tice arrives at Peverel, the house where sisters Grace and Caro Bell are staying with the Thrales, who are the parents of Grace’s fiancé Christian. Ted, a scientist, is there as an apprentice to elderly Professor Sefton Thrale. He notes that while Caro is striking, Grace is conventionally beautiful.

Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary

The sisters are Australian and are staying with the Thrales until Caro settles into her government job in London. Sefton Thrale pretends to be happy about his son’s engagement to an Australian girl, though he holds patronizing views about this former British colony.

Ted develops an unrequited crush on Caro. Caro is sparky and indifferent, saying that she does not care for science, Ted’s field.

Mrs. Thrale’s godson, Paul Ivory, comes up in conversation at dinner. Paul is a poet’s son, a literature professional, and the soon-to-be fiancé of a lord’s daughter. He is coming to stay with the Thrales. When Caro says that she does not care about science, Sefton Thrale tells her that “[she] owe[s] [her] existence to astronomy” (15), as Australia would have never been colonized by the British if Captain James Cook had not chanced upon it during a voyage to Tahiti to see the planet Venus’s transit (15).

The narrator reveals that Ted Tice will commit suicide many years into the future but before reaching the apex of his professional achievement. 

Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary

This chapter is set a year before the main action and recounts Christian Thrale’s visit to the flat that Grace and Caro are sharing with their older half-sister Dora. They have been working at Harrods to support themselves. The girls’ parents died in a capsized ferry when they were children, and Dora raised them. They consider the move from Australia to Europe the achievement of their lives.

Christian wishes the girls were more embarrassed about receiving him in their furnished flat; he wants them to consider him a manly rescuer. He tells Caro that it is unlikely that she will pass the examination for a government job, as no woman ever has. He decides that Grace, who is “already a departure” from the British woman he expected to court (23), will be the object of his affections; Caro would be “beyond his means” (23). Grace and Christian meet the next Wednesday to dine.

Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary

Back in the present, Ted Tice and Caro take a bus to visit a stately home. British summertime strikes Caro, who is used to scorching Australian summers, as lush and tame. While Ted is evidently interested in Caro and tries to engage her in conversation, she considers him “no more to her than a callow ginger presence in a cable-stitch cardigan” (26).

Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary

Following their parents’ death, the Bell sisters grow up in Australia under the supervision of their older half-sister Dora. Dora is controlling, often depressed, and talks of looking forward to her own death. As children, Caro and Grace try to behave well and excel at school to impress her. They live under Dora’s matriarchy and men have little influence in their life.

 

Their education, which is dominated by British texts, “place[s] Australia in perpetual, flagrant violation of reality” (31). They learn more about European history and wildlife than Australian. During the Second World War, they feel that they are missing the action because the main bombings are in Europe. When American soldiers come to save them from the Japanese, they wish they were “a better class of savior: Americans could not provide history, of which they were almost as destitute as Australians” (46).

Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary

Ted, who comes from a working-class, Northern English background, stands out at school for his aptitude. However, in 1946 he is forced to enlist and go to Hiroshima, Japan, where American troops command the British forces. The flattened city and the dignity of the people move Ted, but Captain Girling tells him not to openly show his empathy. 

Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary

Ted walks around Peverel with Caro, attempting to court her. Caro smarts under the intensity of Ted’s attentions, finding that she abhors intimacy after Dora’s incessant scrutiny of her during childhood. She tells Ted, “[Y]ou must not be so interested in me” (56). Ted, who assumes that Caro is afraid of sex, imagines that she “require[s] a kind of conquering” (56). He tells her the story of how at age 16 he helped a German prisoner of war escape. The prisoner eventually ended up in America, where he makes “their weapons now, and ours” (60). While Ted and Caro discuss the moral implications of Ted’s act, he finds that “his story ha[s] created a closeness that [is] human rather than sexual, a crisis of common knowledge too solemn for desire” (63). Any possibility of romantic love is put off. 

Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary

The sisters learn that Dora is to marry Major Ingot in Portugal. They are relieved that her sacrifices for them are over. Still at Peverel, they meet two new characters: cold and impenetrable Tertia Drage, who is a lord’s daughter, and her fiancé, the dashing Paul Ivory, who turns up in a red car. The sisters are immediately taken with Paul, who has a charming manner and seems like the prototypical upper-class Englishman. Meanwhile, a “spontaneous antipathy” emerges between Ted and Paul (68). The house matriarch observes the difference in how the young women greet the two men on arrival. While Caro receives Paul enthusiastically, when Ted arrived, she slinked back up the stairs as though he was no one interesting.

Part 1, Chapter 9 Summary

Paul is a playwright with a new work, Friend of Caesar, debuting in the autumn. Sefton Thrale is convinced that “Paul will make his mark” and be a professional success (71). Ted feels as though he is in competition with Paul and that “one of them must lose if the other were to win” (71).

Caro and Ted find an opportunity to talk. Ted will be going to Edinburgh and then Paris, and Caro, who has passed her exam, will be taking a job in a government office in London. Ted confesses his love to Caro and asks to write to her. Caro says that while she likes Ted better than anyone she has ever known, she cannot imagine falling in love with him. Ted is disappointed as Caro explains how important it is for her to experience living alone after so many years under Dora’s thumb. When the conversation turns to Paul and Tertia, whose relationship is an aristocratic marriage of convenience rather than a love match, Ted offers a damning critique of Paul’s character, saying that “he has no growth, merely automatic transmission” (74).

Later, Caro runs into Paul and the two go for a walk. Paul is attracted to Caro’s dark vigor. While Caro is attracted to Paul, she is uncertain whether to trust him. He comments on Caro’s character, saying she “emanate[s] so much resolve, and all of it unfocused” (76), and that she is solitary. Caro, however, states that she doesn’t feel solitary enough. Paul figures out that Ted has confessed his love to Caro and that she has rejected him. She finds that she feels vulnerable in Paul’s presence. 

Part 1, Chapter 10 Summary

In preparation for Paul and Tertia’s engagement dinner, Ted repairs a table. Caro, who wears a dark, belted dress and wants to be praised for her appearance, disturbs Tertia’s sense that as a British aristocrat she is Caro’s superior.

At dinner, Paul distinguishes Caro with his attentions. Neither Ted nor Tertia are pleased by this. A Captain Nicholas Cartledge comes to the table and exchanges a cold look with Tertia, from which Paul intuits that they were formerly lovers. 

Part 1, Chapter 11 Summary

Paul and Caro drive together to Avebury, a place Caro wants to visit because Ted described it to her. Caro admits that she is sexually inexperienced, and Paul says that he wishes to rectify the situation. Caro is still uncertain of who he is, as “his banter [gives] an unearthly feeling that you [are] not hearing his true voice, and that it might not even exist” (89). She has the feeling that Paul detests Tertia and all the others he claims to be intimate with. Paul then tells Caro the story of his father, Rex Ivory, writing poems about Derbyshire while imprisoned in a Japanese POW camp. He is so immersed in his tale that he forgets that Caro’s own family died in a boating accident.

Part 1, Chapter 12 Summary

Paul and Caro are in awe of the Avebury stone circle’s sublime beauty. They kiss and return to the car for further petting. Caro’s show of self-sufficiency attracts Paul, but the realization that her “influence [over him] might increase with her submission” surprises him (99). They go to an inn, where they make love and Caro loses her virginity. Being at the inn with Paul reminds her of her father.

Meanwhile, Ted is in Edinburgh reading Caro’s letter. The letter tells him she went to Avebury but omits the part about Paul. She also informs him that she has moved to London to take the government job. She implores him to not “lose [his] precious time on [her]” because “there is no future [she] believe[s] in as [she] do[es] in [his], and no one else whose ambition ever seemed so clear a form of good” (102). Ted is sad because he is as much in love with Caro as ever. 

Part 1, Chapter 13 Summary

Paul and Caro find an opportunity to make love at Peverel while the others are out. While Paul is openly hostile to Tertia, he feels a freedom with Caro that is near to a joy he does not normally experience.

Later, Captain Nicholas Cartledge spots Caro getting out of an old green Humber motor vehicle. He tries to engage her in conversation and notices that “her appearance [is] wild, […] because of an emanation of helpless shock” (109). He sits opposite Caro on the train and wonders whether she is upset about Ted or Paul. When he asks her where she intends to go, she mentions a place in Gloucester Road that takes in Australians. He offers to let Caro stay with him. Caro, who suspects that he is coming onto her, says, “I have already made love today” (112). He says that he is aware of the terms and calls her a cab, which she immediately gets into. It is unclear whether they go home together.  

Part 1, Chapters 1-13 Analysis

The novel’s first section, titled “The Old World,” shows the mark the Australian Bell sisters make in postwar Britain—a country then on the verge of losing its once enormous global empire and unparalleled status to the United States. The fact that during WWII the American military proved more critical than Britain to Australia—a former British colony—illustrates this shift. Nevertheless, the Bell sisters’ disappointment with their liberators reflects the extent to which they accept the mythology of the British Empire. Similarly, through the characters of Christian Thrale and Tertia Drage especially, Hazzard shows that the British upper classes still have a superiority complex. They are lazy and cynical, dismiss Ted Tice for his working-class roots, and expect deference from the Australian Grace and Caro. Indeed, Sefton Thrale remarks to Caro that both she and Australia owe their very existence to an Englishman’s accidental discovery. This is a colonialist perspective, which takes for granted that Australia wasn’t truly there (or, presumably, truly inhabited) until the British discovered it. It also explains why he feels superior to the Bell sisters.

The sisters themselves, who consider having reached the world that their education has prepared them for “an attainment” and even “an occupation” (22), oscillate between pride and deference. As Christian and several other characters observe, Grace seems more beholden to British society’s hierarchical structure, with its rigid class and gender norms. Caro, on the other hand, seems more defiant, which is why Christian immediately renounces her as a potential bride. She especially flouts traditional gender roles, both in her desire to be on her own for a while before being shuttled into a marriage and in her relative frankness regarding sex. Nevertheless, she too is prey to British class distinctions. She dismisses working-class Ted as a lover in favor of gallant playwright Paul Ivory, who resembles the Englishman of her imagination. However, by featuring Ted first and sharing detailed excerpts of Ted’s point-of-view, Hazzard sets him up as the most suitable partner for Caro.

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