Shirley Hazzard

I picked up a pristine copy of The Great Fire last week at a charity shop. Levi Stahl had previously asserted that Ms. Hazzard requires patience and heeding such I spent the week stretching into its expansive world of lush possibility and metal-cold privation. I read a review early on, which included the following passage:

Imagine if Jane Austen had returned to travel the world in the mid-20th century and to read novelists like Henry James, E.M. Forster and Graham Greene. What might she have written? Something like Shirley Hazzard's ''The Great Fire''?